What is the Creative Common Licence About?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Australia License.

You may be puzzled, why I have put a Creative Common Licence on this blog? This is a public viewable blog, so it is necessary to make it clear that the information and photos we are sharing here do still belong to the person sharing them and that they may be used and reproduced elsewhere only under a set of specific condition. If your works are used then the must include an attribution to yourself, and please note anyone reproducing things from here it is common courtesy to notify the person who posted or submitted a photo. They can not be used for commercial purposes and they must be shared in the same form (ie under the same CC licence). In other words if someone wants to use or copy your work claim "Fair Use" because it is published under in the "Public Domain" (ie on the internet) then that fair use does have specific limits! This is to protect those wanting to share their observation and work.

Even if you share a post or link to a photo from here, you are entitled to have a more limited CC licence for your work. For example Flickr supports CC licences and encourage their members to set them by default for your photostream but also lets you individual set licence and access to photos individually. Posting or linking from here does not override that licence.

Welcome

This is a new home for The VBOP project. It was formerly set up as a free NING group but unfortunately that will be closed down at the end of this month. So all the connect from there will be moved over to here (well most of it, everything t6hat is possible).

Also this site will be set up a little more opening than before, you don't have to join anything, you can post your observations elsewhere in the many Social Networks that make up WEB 2.0. This [place should be a convenient place for you to link to those places, post & photos.

This will also be a great place to find out what needs to be observed and how to record it

Drifting North Again

This panorama was taken at the beach 5 car park and shows how the sandbars are attached to the beach at the southern end (see this photo full size). You can also see the ruts developing into rip channels also point to a return to genrally northerly longshore drify

Does Size Matter

Pipi Shell from Venus Bay (note the chipped edge again)

Compared with Pipi shells in New Zealand.
My hand is the same one in both photos, by the way. I suspect the shells are the same species. The difference is there is a "cultural" size limit as well as a 150 bag limit when collecting Pipis, and most shellfish, in New Zealand.
Do we need a size limit as well as an enforce limit to be imposed? Before all the pipis are gone from our beach.

I undertook an improptu survey of pipi shells as I walk from beach 1 to beach 2. I picked up the larger shells thinking i would check their size. then I noticed their edges. Of the eleven shells I had picked up, ten had chipped edges. Further none had the tell tale little hole near the crown indicating they had been killed by another hungry mollusc. These shells where probably all forcefully open with a knife! To say the least I was shocked that they vast majority of shells showed sign of being open and discarded on the beach.