Field locations you have loved

In this thread I want to hear about field locations YOU have loved, and WHY.  Here's a couple of mine to get the ball rolling:

Kedron Brook, Brisbane, Australia.  A choked little stretch of suburban creek on the north east side of Brisbane Australia was a key field location for my PhD research, which was all about introduced (exotic) species and their parasites in rivers and streams in Australia.  At one point just above the tidal influence - stylishly named KB216 for its map reference - this creek is basically completely exotic: plants, invertebrates, fish, the whole shebang.  There aren't many parasites there, but those that were present were introduced hitchhikers.  Not sexy, but a veritable Shangri-La for a student on the hunt for ferals...

Heron Island, Queensland, Australia.  Where I met and fell in love with marine biology.  A patch of sand and guano-reeking Pisonia forest 800m long, on a reef 10 times that size, crawling with noddies, shearwaters, turtles, grad students and squinting daytrippers or more wealthy sunburned resort guests.  Too many firsts for me there to even list (but no, not that one - get your mind out of the gutter!).  Absolute heaven, hands-down.  How do I get back?

Throgs Neck, NY, USA.  You generally wouldn't think of the junction of Queens and the Bronx as a biologically interesting in any way (except maybe on the subway), but actually the western part of Long Island Sound was the epicenter of a lobster holocaust that started in (well, before, if you ask me) 1999.  When we were out on the RV Seawolf, the Throgs Neck bridge marked your entry into the East River and the start of one of the most unique and strangely beautiful urban research cruises around, right down the East side of Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty and out into the Lower NY bays.  We would pass through on our way to do winter flounder spawning surveys off the beach at Coney Island (its that or go around Montauk).  Proof that not all interesting biology takes place in Peruvian rainforests...

In the comments, tell us about a field location YOU have loved and why.  Post links if you can find them.

Fish as filters?

There's been a bit of press lately (see for example) surrounding a new paper from VIMS that concludes that the Atlantic menhaden or Bunker (Brevoortia tyrannus) is not very good at cleaning the Chesapeake Bay.  This seems an odd sort of paper but its actually not that crazy an idea.  Its turns out that lots of bivalve species like hard clams and soft clams actually pump enough water through their gills, sifting food as they go, that they can actually have a significant impact on the water clarity and nutrient content of the water.  Indeed, the zebra and quagga mussels that have invaded the Great Lakes have changed the entire ecosystem by doing exactly that.  With clearer water, there's less plankton productivity in the water column and more macrophytic plants and algae growing on the bottom.  Menhaden are filter feeders too, and they can occur in large schools, so perhaps its logical to think that they might be able to do the same sort of thing as the clams.  Alas, based on the VIMS experiments, it seems that they can't.

This is an interesting example of a negative result publication.  Often times you'll hear folks say we shouldn't publish negative results because, technically, you failed to prove that they clean the water, which is not the same as proving that they don't.  Well, as long as everybody is aware of that distinction, I still think negative results like that are useful to know, for two reasons.  One, its likely that they don't; if they do, then the effect is so minor that it was difficult to detect.  And two, it might save someone else from having the same idea and trying the same futile experiment.

The Chesapeake has some sporadic problems with hypoxia, which is ultimately a nutrient pollution issue, so I applaud the researchers for looking at a biological solution for what is otherwise a pretty intractable problem.