2024-07-23 Slashdot Submission : Cocaine with sharks on it's Lasers. Or something like that.

An article submitted to Slashdot. It should have the elements necessary to make the cut, but you never know. Also, 27 other people may have submitted it.

---

The BBC are reporting sharks have tested positive for cocaine. A bakers dozen of sharpnose sharks which were captured off the coast near Rio de Janeiro were tested for the drug in liver and muscle tissue samples and returned positive results at concentrations as much as 100 times higher than previously reported for other aquatic creatures.

The research was published in Science of the Total Environment. The little-known "sharpnose" sharks were examined because they spend their entire lives in coastal waters, and so are likely more exposed to drugs from human activities than the more cinematic species starring in "Cocaine Shark" or "Cocaine Sharks", two recent productions on the subject featuring hammerheads and tiger sharks (the "trash cans of the sea").

The likeliest source is effluent from drug processing labs inland, though the snorting population of Rio may have pissed their contribution in to the sewers too. (Which begs the question - does nobody make cocaine-reclaiming filters for users - or enterprising apartment block concierges? Yet?)

Whether cocaine is changing the behaviour of the sharks is not known. Perhaps it would affect their aim with their head-mount lasers, bringing their conquest of the land with it's tasty, tasty humans closer. Hollywood, hopefully, has (tyop!) the answers.

---

End of Document
Back to Top.

January Science Readings

January Notes Page

==================

Articles studied this January

Palaeolithic Writing An interesting interpretation of dots and lines on cave art.

Book reviewA bit of a change, notes on a book I was given.

Duolingo notes - FrDuolingo Notes for French course.

End of document

---

January science readings.

An interesting interpretation of dots and lines on cave art.

Cambridge Archaeological Journal : "An Upper Palaeolithic protowriting system and phenological calendar"

I started writing this as a WEIT column, but it's going wider.

They assert that dot counts and a "y-shaped" symbol on Palaeolithic cave art encode information about the breding/ gathering or migration times of the depicted species, compared to a "spring thaw" start date in the year.

It's an interesting idea - but it's a long way from Ventris and Linear B. As a syllabic writing system, Linear B has around a hundred elements, each of which represents (approximately) one concept (sound). So the proposal "Linear B means this set of sounds" has around a hundred elements on which it can be tested. That's enough elements of communication to be able to convey effectively any message in the language. What the computing people call a "Turing complete" system.

This proposal though ... I see four elements to the "writing system" (dots and lines representing a single item ("lunar month", it is proposed) ; the concept of counting itself ; the "Y" symbol, representing "giving birth" ; and implicitly they also need an agreed way of recognising "start of year" - which would probably be the winter solstice or some such marker of "start of year". Which is a bit thin for a writing system. Most non-ideographic writing systems contain a few dozen characters (alphabets, such as the Latin script I'm typing in), or a hundred or so (for syllabaries, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Cuneiform, and Linear B).

Archaeology, at least in Europe, is replete with structures that seem to have some relationship to annual astronomical events, for which a calendar purpose is often imputed. That would align temptingly with the need to have a point in the year to count lunar months from. But ... when you look closely at such structures in one area, you can see up to 45 degrees difference in alignment between adjacent structures. Which puts assignment of this structure to that calendar point, e.g. mid-winter solstice] onto creakingly thin ice.

Reading the paper itself ... they use the French term "bonne saison" meaning the springtime thawing of rivers, melting of snow and greening of the landscape as their reference time, not the mid-winter solstice. Makes reasonable sense.

[I don't know how much American monumental construction has survived to be recognised. I'd be surprised if there were none, but it's not a field I'm familiar with.]

This proposed four-element writing system reminds me of some of the "esoteric" programming languages - specifically Whitespace, which uses [Space], [Tab] and [Linefeed] (but not [Carriage Return], probably to make it DOS-compatible) as the elements of it's writing system. That is sufficient to implement a Turing complete language. But a lot of other common understandings between writers and readers are needed to get meaning out of what is literally a blank page. (Obviously, Whitespace allows comments. So in a program listing, anything the programmer can read will be ignored by the compiler. And of course a Whitespace program can be steganographically hidden in an otherwise innocent text.)

It's a very interesting idea for interpreting these artworks though. It may even be correct that it represents, for some "ritual" purpose [archaeological sense], something about birth/ death and or seasonal cycles. But to actually test that ... quite hard.

How this relates to modern writing systems is another big question. There's 35000-odd years between the peak of preserved cave art and the origins of our current writing systems. Which have fairly complete records from pictographic origins to their present alphabetic (and ideographic) - so these are very unlikely to directly represent a source for those writing systems. These markings may represent the roots of the idea of recording information for use by future generations (or just for teaching the next generation) - which is a necessary step. (The paper puts it as "artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively".) But a direct connection ... I'm not convinced (and the paper doesn't claim that :

"We may not be convinced that the Upper Palaeolithic sequences and associated symbols can be described as written language, given that they do not represent grammatical syntax, but they certainly functioned in the same way as proto-cuneiform. We may not describe them as ‘administrative documents’ as would a Sumerologist (e.g. Van de Mieroop 1999, 13), but that is exactly what they were, record-keeping of animal behaviour in systematic units of time and incorporating at least one verb. We do not want to press the controversial (and in many senses, semantic) question of whether writing was a Palaeolithic invention; perhaps it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing"

- but it's going to be represented as that.

---

A bit of a change, notes on a book I was given.

link

Several months back a friend asked me to read a "based on fact" book - in whose real-world events he played a minor role. So, I did so. I'm not sure he got what he was looking for - I completely didn't engage with the topic of the book, but I was interested in how the author had been let down by the the publishing process. Which might raise some questions for people who are in their own process of writing a book.
Title : Sniper One
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-0-718-14994-9
Number of pages: 350

Published 2007 (I note that there is a 2008 edition which is some 30 pages longer. Some of my issues may have been addressed in this. I don't know, and without a friend nagging at me, I'm unlikely to hunt it down to read.)

The subject of the book was the activities of a British Army squadron (platoon, whatever - like I said, it's not a subject I'm interested in) working in southern Iraq during the "peace keeping" activities after "Gulf War 2" and the "regime change" which has been such a remarkable success. But that's not the fault of the squaddies on the ground.

The claim to fame (infamy?) of this “deployment” is that they were involved in the longest sustained firefight of a British Army unit. While "peace keeping". We really should re-introduce the row of pike-mounted heads of politicians ... over the entrance to the Houses of Parliament maybe? The book is full of various military derring-do, and a moderate amount of jargon. Which is where the technical problems start to come in.

The author used a ghost-writer. Well, no shame in that. Even royalty does it! But it's clear that the ghost-writer didn't have the same level of familiarity with the equipment and jargon that the professional (and nominal author) did have. So when the reader also lacks familiarity ... who did what, to whom, using what becomes unclear. Now normally, that would be something that an editor or copy-editor would pick up on, and send the manuscript back with a small forest of post-it notes for the author (or ghost) to attend to. Well, that round of editing certainly hadn't happened with the version I read (see note above about a 2008 edition). Which doesn’t speak well for Penguin Ltd, whose job this is.

There’s another complicating factor for books like this (by serving soldiers, in particular) – they have to go through a military censor too. I doubt they were In the slightest bit interested in whether the book was clear, or if the author made a fool of himself – as the current furore over some Royal’s autobio and his “kill count” shows.

In the following listing, page numbers refer to the 2007 UK hardback.

Error listing for Sniper One

Page number	Comment or query
Front matter, x - xi	The location map. My contact tells me that the version they had “on the ground” was decorated with various coloured legends on particular roads, allegedly intended to make life difficult for people listening in to radio traffic. “Going to roundabout Red 5” being less clear than “Going to roundabout between Amarah Street and Nasiriyah Road”. Which is fine enough in itself. Unfortunately, the reproduction in the book is in monochrome, and these distinctions have been lost. That’s a common problem in publishing – getting figures to come out well, particularly in the body of a book (photographic plates are a different matter). So if you’re trying to get your book published, really pay close attention to what your editor tells you about figures. They (the publishing companies) probably can make do with a sketch in paint on toilet paper, but they’ll do a much better job if you can present your figure as a PDF, or some other electronic image format. The production process is electronic from the ghost writer to the delivery carton at the bookshop, and you may as well accept that, not fight it. That doesn’t guarantee success (a correspondent in the 1990s was still let down by the quality of printing and poor contrast in his “trade” book, despite having done academic publishing for decades) but it improves the odds.
Front matter, x - xi	Separate from how the presented maps were processed and reproduced is an issue of scale. A single figure isn’t adequate to give the reader either the strategic overview (where this site was in relation to Baghdad, to the British forces bases in Basra and to the British advance base from which this “CIMIC” outpost was supplied. Similarly the “town size” map doesn’t really display the environment around “CIMIC”, the fire lines, the ranges of mortars and different guns … That lack is in the hands of the author (and to a lesser degree, the ghost-writer). In my opinion.
Front matter, xix	The author refers to heat detonating a high explosive bursting charge in a device. Which is not, typically, how high explosives work. As my soldier friend confirmed in subsequent conversations, this is covered in training (it’s important for rigging demolition charges, for example), but clearly someone had forgotten. Discussing that in a pub, we were both expecting the armed police to come bursting in at any moment – alerted by someone ear-wigging from the next table.
pages passim (Far too many to list.)	This is a jargon-rich field. Lots of GMPGs and Gimpys and DishDash. For enthusiasts, this may be fine. But for the casual reader, it gets very confusing. The edition I was reviewing had 10 blank pages at the back. There was room for a glossary, and a crying need for one.
38	A related matter – both the original author and (probably) the ghost writer made some technical errors. One that caught my eye was a reference to a “silver compass”. Which sounds like military extravagance, but in fact refers to a trademark of the Silva ® company, who supply mountaineers and others with robust, single piece, easy to use compasses. Yes, I’m being picky, but I was asked to be picky. See also p.76
40 (when I noted it)	Another point for the glossary : there is (unsurprisingly) a fair bit of discussion of ammunition. But which ammunition could be used in which weapon (so, which weapon’s ammo would be a backup for which other weapon) was something I still haven’t worked out. Again, it’s probably something that an enthusiast in this field knows already, but it’s (still, after conversation with my soldier friend) obscure to me. I’d hope an editor would catch such failures to communicate. I had quite similar thoughts about batteries, battery packs etc. At that time, my soldier friend tells me everything ran on single-use alkaline cells, but rechargeable power packs are likely becoming more of a thing these days.
63	More for the editor – how long does it take to re-load a magazine. (My soldier friend tells me the bullets come on disposable metal-&-plastic strips, and it takes a few seconds. The Hollywood thing of pressing bullets one-by-one into a magazine is Hollywood bullshit. As is taping two magazines together so you can jam one up with dirt.)
72	In the description of an ambush, there was concern about leaving an immobilised vehicle behind, because (paraphrasing) it contained “sensitive” communications equipment. But if it’s that sensitive, shouldn’t it carry a self-destruct? Or the crew carry thermite grenades for it’s destruction.
76	Another bit of slip-shod editing : repeatedly the General Purpose Machine Gun, “GPMG” is mentioned. But when a “GMPG” is mentioned … the reader spends some time working out why that sounds wrong. Or is there actually a “GMPG”? Much brain-sweat is wasted.
81	I noted this as another point where I couldn’t get the text description to align with the map.
109	More sloppy copy-editing. Some of the right words, in – to misquote Morecambe and Wise - some of the right orders.
179	An unexplained item for the glossary : a “multiple” seems to be a grouping of people from several units. There is also a lot of radio traffic discussion that totally confused me. There seems to be a logic to this, but what it is isn’t at all clear.
188	Rules of Engagement prohibited shooting at non-combatants, and I raised the question of how an enemy sniper’s “dicker” differed from the author’s squad of snipers, each of whom had their own “spotter”. Therefore both are targets. My soldier friend tells me that a later senior officer in that area agreed with that interpretation … and the “dickers” learned to keep their heads down.
189	A “dicker” is mentioned carrying a radio. Which raises the question of whether their side had encrypted or scrambled radios (we had a chat about Hedi Lamarr – which was news to my soldier friend), or whether the “Allies” had adequate listening capability.
191	The maps question from page x – xi got bad enough that I had to start trying to sketch my own map to work out who was where.
192	More glossary entries, an UGL (Underslung Grenade Launcher) and a Джке (Dshko ? – a Russian sniper weapon?).
201	This is where the need for an area map (S Iraq, or the area controlled by British forces) became obvious enough to prompt a note. Also, a “tree hook” was mentioned, leaving me somewhat puzzled.
203	What is a “sling set-up”?
242	Possibly related to p.201 and p.203, I asked about a “cheese cutter pole” – which is a protection against throat-cutting wires strung across a tank’s route.
254	Islamic martyr mythology doesn’t promise jihadis any “Vestal Virgins” – they were the (all too) human attendants of the hearth and temple of Hera in ancient Rome. If they got caught having sex, they’d be bricked up into the temple walls while alive.
287	I asked about the (popular) myth of a rifle being able to kill someone through a wall. To which the response was “what sort of wall”?

There were several other “Glossary” notes. Frankly, if asked to proof-read this I’d have gone through the whole text file, adding both “Index” and “Glossary” entries, then sent the pages to the author to be filled out. [Different word processors, different procedures.]

Well, I was asked to make comments on the book by my friend. I’ve done so. It’s not a genre I’m particularly interested in, but I learned more about military operations than I ever really wanted to. Now I can put it on the bookshelf and stop worrying about it.

---

Duolingo notes on French

PDF stored on Box

You'll have to click the "Download" button on the page that links to. Probably I can find a better supplier, but it's good enough for me.

I study various languages on Duolingo, which is a challenge-response based language teaching app. As I go along, I make notes of the Challenge-Response pairs, some of their grammar notes, and anything else that grabs my attention. Then, after each session, I go back through and revise my notes with the electronic equivalent of a highlighter pen. The link above is the first chunk of my notes from the French course. I completed the course in late 2022, with my note-taking methhodology developing in the process, ... and almost immediately Duo Inc® updated the course structure. Odd that. Not the first time either. Well, the PDF is 63 pages of notes from the first part of the course (I messed up, losing the intra-document links in making the PDF ; I'll fix that later with a revision.). The new bits of the course are more detailed (another 17 pages, just for two units of about 20 new "units") and I'm probably more consistent in my highlighting and links between grammar sections and course content section. But that'll come later.

---

End of Document
Back to List.

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.

New Year 2015-2016.

New Years pretty sky things.

 London skyline from Primrose Hill. A huge pall of smoke from the fireworks drifts east  from the Eye (site of the firework display) ; the Post Office Tower shines somewhat excessively in the foreground. And the Moon and Jupiter look down on the whole lot, unconcerned.
The park's ground has been trashed. And rubbished severely too. Both Oksana and I got hit by flying (falling) champagne corks in the last minutes of the nominal old year.

 More traditional firework photos.




New Year's Eve weird things. The sheep in the back row has 3 horns.

Seriously. I suspect a developmental problem. But this being the Land of the Inbred Yokels (Cotswolds), it could be someone's idea of a joke.

Close up :

Quite how someone could attach a third horn to a sheep is one question ("Why" is another), while I could envision developmental issues where a horn could be duplicated. Then there's always the "parasitic twin" explanation.

Skye, June, 2010

A couple of years ago I had a great  break on Skye, doing some archaeology, some walking, a bit of wildlife photographing, and just generally having a good time.
I posted a photo album about it on FaceJerkOff at the time, but since I've been getting increasingly distrustful of their policies since ... well, since they existed, to be honest, I've been taking my content off there in fits and starts, and I guess now is the time to move that album off too.

Uamh an Ard Achadh - "Cave of the High Pastures", or "Tin Can Alley" in times gone by (the current farmers are much more appreciative of it than previous ones, who just considered it a trap for their beasts). A natural limestone cave which appears to have been used as some sort of ritual site in the Mesolothic to early Iron Age, with modification of the cave entrance by dry-stone dyking, probably ploughing (ritual? - earliest agriculture in the area?) and the deliberate (or at least, non-accidental) burial of valuable artefacts.

It's a bit hard to see (this is not a site report!) but the meandering path of the deeply incised entrance runs away towards the dig which is in material piled up behind dry-stone dyking at the downstream end of the entrance passage.

The area is just plain beautiful.

 That's a nice view to wake up to in the morning.

 The fluffy highland coo. About as natural to the area as humans are, and probably imported from central Europe with the "Neolithic Revolution" around 5000 years ago. but they've settled in well.

 On Saturday and Sunday, the professional archaeologists have days of rest, so I did the same and took a boat trip around the islands of the Inner Minch - the so-called "Small Isles". A sea-stack with very evident columnar jointing - basaltic volcanism.

 Sea fidos. Gurt wet slobbering blobs.

 Arf!

 Puffins - they hardly look as if they can take off, and it's a huge performance.

 Basking shark. Big shark, no teeth.

 From the "behind the wall" deposits. It needs conserving properly, but it's an iron spear head. In it's day, this was your Porsche, crossed with an Exocet missile. Or something broadly equivalent. We may not know what was the process of thought was that led to it being positively buried behind a stone wall in a modified ritual site (which had probably been in use for a couple of THOUSAND years by this point), but we do know that it was not an accidental loss.

 Archaeologists often complain about being presented with finds "out of context". This is what they mean by "context" : each of those little white tags labels a "context" - a bed of sediment whose relative date (compared to other contexts) can be determined by the "A-overlays-B" and "C-cuts-across-D" arguments of stratigraphy. It's bread and butter work to an archaeologist (and I'm up to the eyeballs in the same sort of work drilling my oil wells), but it's absolutely essential to getting a proper understanding of a site (or oil well). And with it, we can do things like this :

 These are wooden fragments, possibly from a turned or carved bowl, taken from one of the "contexts in the image above. They're large enough to probably give a good carbon date to the context from which they come. AND thereby, they constrain the possible dates for many of the other contexts on the site.
Then along comes some creationist dipshit and dismisses this sort of work with "the archaeologists are lieing bastards who are blinded by their science to the power of our great sky fairy". Well, fuck you, god-squaddies - you plainly do not understand just how much hard, painstaking, detailed work you are casually brushing aside just to make yourselves feel less insignificant than you are.
These dingbats really do make me seethe.

---

To de-seethe, another bit of Skye's improbable scenery. The Old Man of Storr. See it before it falls over!

 There's a famous fossil site near the Old Man. It's a "no hammer" zone, but that doesn't preclude one finding excellent fossils in the beach debris. However ... when the site says "check the tide tables", it means "do not turn up on a whim without the slightest idea of the state of the tide". consider yourselves warned.

Lybster oil drilling site. There's an oil well of considerable weirdness being drilled there. The interest and amusement are pretty esoteric though.

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.

A few more Tanzanian Piscines

 I took a couple of days field break in the nearby town of Mtwara, sans internet, and managed to get a dive in at the "Monoliths" site and the "Fish Market" site near the town.

Dive equipment, camera and buddy were from Graeme Marrs at ECO2 dive centre in the former slave port of Mikidani, a couple of km along the coast from Mtwara.

The two dive sites differ markedly. The Monoliths are pinnacles rising to about 10m below sea level from a harbour bottom at [considerably greater depth - you're not going there without a squeaky voice], and giving a good reef-ish or wall-ish dive requiring a boat.
(As always, the photos below are considerably reduced from the originals.)
The usual suspects were visible. Moorish Idols were strutting their stuff all over the place, then showing off their thinness the moment you press the shutter :

Moorish Idol on the Monoliths

They can be a bit of a tease, because they're reasonably unconcerned by photographers coming up on them, but they dart around a lot, often disappearing because they're so thin laterally.

Meyers Butterflyfish

This one is considerably less common than the Moorish Idol, and moves away more rapidly. It's also very laterally compressed, showing the almost disc-shaped form of the typical Butterflyfish. Very pretty.

 The Tanzanian relaxed attitude to ... well, everything ... is obvious in some of the fishes too (this one on the Monoliths) :

Siesta time

The Monoliths was a fun dive, but having quite a bit of swash (we'd got 1-2m of swell on surface), we were getting bounced around quite a bit, which makes photography a bit awkward. Then we moved on to the Fish Market, in the harbour area of the town. This is a "muck dive" - a muddy bottom giving way to the south to patch reefs. Lots of life in the mud, but also lots of debris from the (literal) Fish Market onshore. This site can be done as a shore dive too, without requiring excessive (and most un-Tanzanian) levels of  masochism, unlike the Monoliths, which would be severely hard work, even given good navigation.
A lot of the life hides down in burrows or under logs.

Shrimp ( Rhynhocinetes durbanensis ? approximately) on the underside of a log ; catfish under the log itself.

The common anemone fish are present on the more reefy bits, including this couple who are not interested in having any photos taken of their homes.

See you! Nemo!

 They really are territorial, and that makes them easy to photograph. So people do.

Platyhelminth - a.k.a. flatworm. colourful, so probably horribly poisonous.

Towards the south end of the Fish Market site coral heads become more common, with more vertebrate life.

Peekaboo !

Or maybe it was looking for a place for a nice kip? It was very definitely siesta time by then.

Sites : 10 Degrees South (and ECO2 dive centre ; adjacent)

View Larger Map
Monoliths (approximate ; don't try navigating off this) :


View Larger Map
And finally, the Fish Market :

View Larger Map
This is also called the Dhow Port, for fairly obvious reasons. The rotting remains of a tug boat are beached here, and the dive runs SSE from there.
All in all, a fun day in the water, and tyhanks and a plug again for Graham and ECO2 for organising the trip. And a Bajaji (Piagagia 3-wheel taxi ; a "tuk-tuk" in most of the rest of the world) back into town after a fine meal and +1m decompression stop.

Call off the search parties - Nemo has been found!

Had another swim back out to the reef this lunch time, along with Howard the DD. I went out a few days ago too, and deliberately didn't take the camera to make sure it was a shorter trip. Needless to say, on that trip I saw lots of interesting things, but with no evidence, they're already fading in my memory.
But today's snorkel ...
Howard was having plenty of fun.


















Which is the purpose of the exercise.

















Turtle shell
After much splashing around, and hunting for the reef break (where there is a line of coral heads at 4-5m, with a lot of life), we headed back towards shore.
I spotted this turtle carapace, laying on the seabed.

Last time I was here on Nyuni, I found parts of a turtle plastron (the front, dorsal or belly piece of the shell. And I'd found washed-up pieces of them on the beach too. So finding a carapace wasn't a great surprise.
After I'd taken a couple of photos of it as it lay on the seabed, interior with the ribs visible upwards, I was wondering if I'd have any hope of getting it back home. CITES, paperwork, difficult. And look at the size of it - that drag anchor for the goodie-bag is about 12cm long. I'm not getting that into my rig bag!
So, I got my photos first, then looked at the problem of "Can I carry this to shore without drowning?", as a necessary precursor to "Can I get this through customs?"
Then I turned it over. Surprise time!
The shell started to delaminate. This dark outer covering came off as thin flexible sheets of a plastic-like material, with a layer of flesh (fatty?) bonding it onto the expanded ribs of the carapace (the bony shell).

I decided that I wasn't going to be able to carry this back to shore. The rest of the "get through customs" problem becomes a non-problem.


It's still there, if you want it. Though it's probably moved with each tide.



Next thing I spotted ... Can you see him? (Or, more likely, her?)

I saw it snaking across the seabed, then hiding behind this rock.















This is a crop from the main image above.





It's a Moray Eel, I think a White-eye Moray, but I'm not certain on that.









And for about the 4th time, Blogger's accursed post editor has lost 4 or 5 photos that I uploaded. And this is a really horrible, horrible editor.

A different type of puffer fish.

Oh, sorry, Blogger has lost the original picture of a different species of puffer fish.











And finally the bloody anenomefish that inspired the title of this post. Unfortunately the pictures have got so screwed up and I don't have time to struggle with this pathetic editor any more.

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