Nautilus coven.

Allegedly 876 (a suspicious number) ft - a bit less than 300m - down in the Pacific near Palau.

Lighting is suspiciously bright. 

Original pic

My reading.

Diving in Benin

I'm trying to gather contacts about doing some diving in Benin. Same sort of deal as when I was in Tanzania last year, operations will give me a few days break in town.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of info. An article in Africandiver.Com from 2009 refers to a commercial diving operation in Cotonou harbour, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I'm following that up.
Another blog posts about diving with the same people in 2012 ... actually at about the same time that I was at ECO2 in Tanzania. And I'm following that up too.
Going from a visitor every 3 years, to one a year may not be exactly a thriving business opportunity, but it's also several hundreds of percent growth.

UPDATE : I eventually contacted the company, but he was very busy with regular diving work in Cotonou harbour, with no time or interest in providing fills or gear for amateur visitors.

Calamari-that-steals ; Diving El Condesito (originally "El Condosito")

A comic I read recently had a character described (offstage) as
"calamari-that-steals", which reminded me of this character that I met on a dive last year.

Sepia, cuttlefish, or if you're eating it, calamari, on the wreck of the El Condesito, Tenerife

I have to say that this squid did not exhibit any Sqid-like tendencies and made no attempt at stealing my  wallet. Sam clearly has work to do on Earth, if he can get past the shoot-on-sight orders. (See freefall.purrsia.com if this makes no sense. It won't make much sense afterwards, but it's a fun web-comic.)

A few other photos from the same dive series :

Blue-fin damselfish on El Condesito. The reason for the name should be obvious.

Ornate Wrasse, El Condesito. Close up, the patterning on the head makes me try to remember the names of the various bones in the vertebrate skull.

Oksana's photo of the diving conditions from the top of the cliffs. Not the exact location of El Condesito, but representative.

A different dive site, known as "Roncadores del Faro" ; a "Faro" is a lighthouse (think of the Wonder of the Ancient World, the "Pharos of Alexandria", the archetypical lighthouse.) and is very visible above water (what else are lighthouses for?) ; the fish in the picture are "Roncadores".

Some people aren't impressed.

Note on photos : the red splodges spoiling the corners of the pictures are text comments added by my automatic thumbnail-image generator. If for some reason you want the original image (typically 3-5 times the linear resolution, 9-25 times the pixel count, no text), contact me. Deals are possible for commercial use, or if you've got a good enough other reason, then make your case.

Nyuni - Batch #4 - boat round the island.

Various of us took one of the boats for a trip round the island. Nothing particularly spectacular to be seen form the boat, but once we were back into the lagoon, I went over the side to a patch reef that the boat-master indicated.
First thing to draw my attention was a patch of "Needle Sea Urchins" amongst corals (a species probably in Acropora, but I won't hang for that). Just pretty.













While photographing that, I noticed that, for reasons still unclear, the sea urchins were congregating in particular patches. I don't know why ; I guess that there was something about the substrate that they liked there, but not elsewhere.













A brilliant blue+yellow fish was shoaling in the area.


















They particularly liked gathering around a large lobster pot on the reef, but they would also follow each other around over the reef edge too (where I wasn't going to go on ALP, Available Lung Power).
















After much hunting around on the net, I identified these as Yellowtail Fusiliers ; they shoaled with Twinstripe Fusiliers, which are only marginally less colourful. (Though this picture doesn't do the colour of the two yellow stripes justice ; I'm going to have to start using the colour balance tool for these duck dives to 3 or 5m.


















On my next dive, I spotted this "different" branching coral - which I can't identify.



















I've spent more time than I care to think about staring at this sort of assemblage of fossils and sediments ("wackestone to packstone", anyone?), but even so it was very nice to see these environments "in the flesh" as it were.

Nyuni - batch #3

Attempted to swim out from east end of the island to the eastern barrier/ fringing reef. Didn't get there. Partly through meeting this "cleaner station" (?) on the reef top. Organisms : "brain coral" (fewer zombie jokes, please) ; sea urchins (one of 3 genera seen on this swim ; others have more robust spines in two different colours (which may or may not be important) ; the yellow-black striped fish is, I think, a "Sergeant Major" (distinguished from the Convict Surgeonfish by relatively thicker black bars, and the body being yellow above and silver-white below) ; and the blobby B+W fish looks like it should be a Clown Fish (stars of "Nemo: Found", or some film like that) ... and indeed, visually it looks like a "Saddleback clownfish". But that's a Western Indian Ocean species (not a problem itself ; coelacanths went one way, why couldn't something go the other way?, AND it should have a yellow mouth. Looking on the web ... there seem to be several closely similar species. And considerable intra-specific variation. So I'm not going to worry too much more about it.

Next! Well , after leaving the "cleaning station, I carried on out toward the reef front. But things were getting gradually more interesting as the water very slowly got deeper. After 50mins of travel, I got to this area where - hard to see in static photos - there were in the order of 30 more "LBJ" shoaling around in the seaweed. Obviously, the brownness works for camouflage.
Then ... horror of horrors ... the battery went flat!
Well there's a lesson : if swimming OUT to somewhere, try to do it on your back to avoid being distracted.


And that's me caught up to today!

Nyuni, Tz, Batch #02 : Today, I swims with zee fishes

Title to be spoken in a menacing gangster-esque voice. "Sung Soprano", or something like that.


Went for a bit of a swim yesterday, but there is quite a current around high tide on the headland of the island, so I moved round to the south. Between wind and current there was quite a chop going - 30cm or more, which made snorkelling a less than comfortable occupation.
Fair amount of sea life, but I made no attempt at getting out to the reef margin - I'm really regretting not bringing my fins to Nyuni, but may have a Cunning Plan (TM, Pat.Pending).


Snorkelling in very shallow water, I was being constantly buffeted by the swell. So when I tried videoing things, the steadiness wasn't. No point in even thinking about shrinking them to something postable.
Firstly, these lobate or fan-shaped organisms (a major component of the biota :


I've named the file as if they're seaweed, but the more I think about it, the less I'm convinced. The colour isn't wrong for some algae (red photosynthetic organisms are nothing new), but the paleness of the colour ... doesn't make sense. They're thick enough to be more-or-less opaque, so why not absorb all the light you can in your waveband? Besides, I'm pretty sure that I've seen something similar common in UK waters, but can't find it in online compendia of algae ... therefore, it's probably not an alga. Could they be Bryozoa? But my memory tells me that Bryozoa have stiff meshes as a water filtering device. Rather like a stalk-less crinoid. Which doesn't really fit for these. [SHRUGs ; moves on]

I can't find these yellow-bar-fish in any online references either, but that's probably just the crudity of my search techniques. These wriggly things that go under the name of "alive fossils" don't really attract my attention until they've got fossilized. But this couple of "yellow-bar-fish" seemed to be defending the seabed hole against big ugly me. So once I'd taken a few photos, I moved on. (Without fins, holding station in chest-deep water against around a 1m/s current was a noisy affair.) There's a flashy fish in shot as well - brilliant reflections of "structural colour". I don't recognise either species.


THIS is what happens to people who look (too closely) at the small stuff. (American Scientist, v99#4 p311)

"Wow. A tube worm actually emerging from it's tube! Isn't this the most exciting thing you've ever seen?"

--
Aidan Karley