Same Cute Turtle

I have posted a picture of this turtle before but decided to post another because he was pretty impressive.

As I mentioned in my original post, I spent about 5 minutes watching it eating on either side of the coral head. What was impressive is that while he (or she, hard to tell) knew that I was there he just carried on eating, and checking me out from time to time.

Turtles are pretty tame if you don’t threaten them, but they will swim away very fast if you annoy them (I know because once a dive master grabbed one to show it off and it swam like hell as soon as he let go, needless to say I did not dive with that dive master again).

A recent article in the NY Times, “Turtles Are Casualties of Warming in Costa Rica”, is well worth reading, the title says it all, and there is a slideshow to go along with it.

I see turtles on most of my dives but I never tire if it, and all divers I have known never tire of seeing them either, they are truly special.

The Shark Swam Right Over Me

This pictures was not taken by me but by one of the crew on the boat I was on. I was taking pictures of some Nurse Sharks and some Caribbean Reef Sharks which had decided to come and check out the ‘attractor’ we had put out for them.

Interestingly the nurse sharks were the most aggressive ones with the ‘attractor’ trying to suck out the fish skin that was in there. Three nurse sharks had showed up, two smaller ones and a larger pregnant female. Somewhere along the dive I have gotten very close it as it was laying down next to a coral head. But in this part of the dive it was checking out the ‘attractor’.

I tend to get pretty close to sharks (much to the concerns of some) and this was no exception. The larger nurse shark turned away from the ‘attractor’ and swam right over me which was very cool. Unfortunately the picture is a little dark.

There are two other pictures worth checking out, here and here, there are both wide angle shots so the sharks actually look further away from me than they actually are.

While you are at it, you might want to check out my good friend JenFu’s underwater photographs, he recently took a trip to the Galapagos and to Cozumel.

Sharks

This is a small Nurse Shark resting on some sand. Nurse Shark feed at night and rest during the day, and have a set of teeth which are used for grinding because they typically feed off the bottom looking for shellfish and crustaceans. They are not aggressive towards divers and are in fact rather curious. Some of them came very close to me.

Last week I said that I would give an update on the sorry state of the shark population, so here are some stats.

Officially 38 million sharks are fished from the ocean, mostly for their fins (the finless shark is dumped back in the water to drown) and some as by-catch (I don’t have any numbers on the ratios.) The real number is most likely between 70 and 100 million because most of the shark fishing is not reported.

In the past 20 years the global shark population has been reduced by 50%, at this rate sharks will be gone by 2030.

Some shark populations have crashed completely, 95% of the Mako sharks off the east coast of the USA are gone.

Each year about 10 people are killed by sharks.

What is really obvious is that sharks are not cuddly or cute, like polar bears or whales for example, which is a real problem for any conservation campaign, and I am still at a loss as to how this can be remedied. A lot of people think sharks are dangerous and in fact the statistics show quite the opposite. As one of the top predators in the oceans, sharks have a vital place in the ecosystem, take them away and there will be major disruptions to that ecosystem. We are already seeing that with an increase in the number of stingrays off the east coast of the US.

I hope that we are more enlightened now than we were when we hunted whales close to extinction, but I am not sure given the lack of response I have seen on this issue.

Lionfish

When I was in the Turks and Caicos a couple of months ago, we saw Lionfish on pretty much every dive we did, if not all the dives. This fish is a native of the Pacific Ocean so had no business being in the Atlantic. It would like seeing a polar bear in the middle of the jungle.

In fact it is a voracious predator consuming very large quantities of small fish, threatening reef ecosystems.

The Economist has a very interesting article about the issue and steps which are being taken to control their population:

Mr Dimin’s company works with fishermen who practise sustainable fisheries management, and helps them get their catches into the sort of high-class restaurants frequented by wealthy conservationists. Mr Dimin got his idea from the appearance in some resorts of “lionfish rodeos”, in which holidaymaking divers round the fish up, and which are usually followed by lionfish cook-ups on the beach. He learned from these that the fish, suitably de-spined, are delicious (they taste like snapper). That got him wondering if consumer demand might be a force powerful enough to halt even an invasive species as successful as the lionfish.

Next week I will post an update about the sorry state of shark populations.

Fingerprint Cyphoma

Nice example of a Fingerprint Cyphoma. The pattern on the shell is actually a mantle that is unfurled over the shell when it is awake (I think!).

It was a treat to see it because it is relatively rare.

Caribbean Reef Shark

This is a nice shot of a Caribbean Reef Shark, we did see them on most of our dives (including night dives) and I got lots of shots of them. Most of the shots I got were not that good (I will blame the gear here as opposed to the photographer but I think it is fair, these shark move quite fast and the camera is very slow to focus and meter the shot.)

Two interesting things about this shot. The first is that I noticed that a lot of sharks were passing over me as I was lying on the sand below, passing quite close in fact, so I decided to lie on my back and take shots like that. I did feel quite vulnerable though. The second thing is that you can see the hull of the boat above shark just to the left of it.

Cute Turtle

I came across this cute turtle on one of our last dives, depth of maybe 50 feet, it was munching on a coral head, moving from one side to the other, not really paying too much attention to me and I was able to get quite close. In fact I just lay there for a while just watching it, letting it get comfortable with me and taking shots. At one point it turned towards me and I managed to take this shot. I was really close to it, a foot away at most.

Remora on a Nurse Shark

Been a while since I posted a scuba picture on sunday. Actually it had been a while since I went diving so there were no new pictures to post, but that was rectified last week as I spent a week scuba diving in the Turks and Caicos and got 29 dives in, 6 on two of the days.

The weather allowed us to go to French Cay and we got 5 dives in there. On one of the dives we were joined by a 5 foot Nurse Shark, actually a pregnant female. What interested me the most was the Remora that was attached to it. The shark took a rest from swimming at some point (they generally sleep during the day and hunt at night) and I was able to get a nice close up of the Remora on its back.

The Remora itself is about 8-10 inches long so this show was a close up, you can see the texture of the scales on the shark itself, pretty neat.

What was interesting about the Remoras was that they would swim alongside the sharks as well as sticking to them. This one would periodically unstick itself, swim around the shark a little and re-stick itself to it.

Why You Can’t See The Great Pacific Garbage Patch On Google Earth

From Google Ocean product manager Steve Miller, via Search Engine Land:

Regarding the availability of satellite imagery of the oceans: Unfortunately we haven’t found great sources of data for most of the open ocean because most imagery providers focus their efforts on the land. Where we do have satellite imagery for the ocean surface, we’ve preserved it in the most recent version of Google Earth and the satellite view in Maps. For example you can still see trawling vessels in southeast Asia. There are a number of potential applications for such imagery, from amateur interest in finding ships to looking at off-shore oil platforms to locating illegal fishing vessels, so it’s certainly worth exploring how we could track down data for the rest of the ocean.

Regarding the gyre: the trash gyre presents its own set of challenges. Even if we had satellite imagery, the gyre likely wouldn’t appear in it. Most of the plastic is particulate and/or a bit under the surface so you can’t see it in the imagery. A number of groups are starting to focus on collecting more data about the gyre via expeditions and sampling – we’d love to see one or more of them produce maps that could be viewed in Google Earth.

There are also links to Wikipedia and a TED conference video by Captain Charles Moore.

Ocean Day II

I thought I would post this picture of a school of Jacks off Dirty Rock in the Cocos Island in honor of Ocean Day. This was shot towards the end of the dive when we were making our accent to our safety stop, the rock face is behind me. This was the head of the school, there were a lot more Jacks behind this came past us and turned into a Jack tornado. I was sorely tempted to follow them to get better pictures but we had been (very strongly) cautioned against going out into the blue because of the currents. A 2 knot current can carry you 1/2 mile in 15 minutes, which would put a diver out of sight of the panga.