[Perhaps you will be relieved to read that this will be the last entry about my diving experiences with the Mike Severns Diving group in Maui in February 2008! I still have to write about some above-the-water whalewatching, though...]
I was about halfway through the dive on the back wall of Molokini, in 65 feet of water admiring a pair of butterfly fish hovering above a small coral head, when Dan the divemaster caught my eye. He waved me over to a coral bommie where most of the other divers were clustered. The bommie was dome-shaped, maybe six feet across and jutting four feet out from the wall, a lovely mass of plate coral, finger coral, lobe coral, and some wire coral. Deep crevices surrounded the area where the bommie was attached to the wall, and Dan pointed into a vertical crack with his flashlight.
There hung a beautiful bright yellow trumpetfish, about three feet long. These amazing ambush predators can hang nearly motionless in the water, hovering with the motions of tiny fins. They can change color at will and orient themselves any which way, from straight horizontal to a diagonal of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-five degrees, or hang absolutely straight with tail up and horn-shaped mouth down. I’ve seen them blend into branching coral, tag along with a big predatory trevally almost like a remora, and sway softly in a bed of algae. I nodded appreciatively and gave Dan the OK sign to thank him for pointing it out.
He shook his head, wiggled his fingers, and probed the crevice with his light again.
And there behind the trumpetfish was the bright-red form of one of my all-time favorite underwater playmates, an octopus!
I whooped into my regulator and flashed Dan a double-OK sign, powered up my camera, and finned in for a closer view.
This was a small specimen, a little over a foot long from tentacle tip to the top of its blobby head. Hanging onto the side of a rock with a few tentacles, it peered at me with its intelligent eyes as it wound and unwound the rest of its sucker-studded tentacle tips. Cringing a bit – I’m a novice underwater photographer and don’t know much about the effects of electronic photo flashes on the sensitive eyes of my friends in the deep – I framed a shot and pressed the shutter.
Click, flash. The octopus shrank back deeper into the crevice, paused a moment, then came floating back out towards me. It wrapped a couple of blood-red tentacles around the rock above and pulled itself up, and I went with it, snapping pictures and laughing.
We played hide-and-seek for several minutes, the octopus oozing into a crevice too narrow for my fingers to follow (even had I been foolish enough to want to), then peering back out at me with only its eyes visible. I sank lower in the water and it came out of its hiding place. I finned up until we were eye to eye and popped off another shot, and the octopus stretched its legs behind it and squirted water like a jet through its siphon to swim several feet away, then settled back onto the bommie.
It crawled around the front edge and I slid around the side. It caught sight of me – it’s pretty much impossible to sneak up on something with such a flexible body and amazing eyesight – and oozed into another crevice. Its eyes came out of the crack like independent creatures, and then two tentacles unfurled and grabbed hold of a rock. It pulled itself out of its hidey-hole with a fluid motion, oozed over some open ground, and sank behind a bulge of coral.
I finned closer, suddenly aware that all the other divers in my party had moved on, and waited until the octopus’s eyes appeared above the bulge again. They ducked down and appeared again and again, each time coming a little higher, like a nervous cartoon character’s.
I took one last picture and waved goodbye, and reluctantly finned off towards the bubbles of my other human companions a few yards down the wall.
If I ever find my misplaced CD of photos from the trip, I will post one or two of my octopus photos!
Showing posts with label diving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diving. Show all posts
Monday, May 12, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
An Odd Highlight for a Wall Dive: Slipper Lobsters in Action!
[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]
Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.
Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.
The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.
The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.
I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.
Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.
Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.
While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.
The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?
I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.
Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.
Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.
The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.
The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.
I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.
Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.
Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.
While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.
The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?
I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Turtles Everywhere
[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]
In about forty-five feet of water, a little murky because of its sandy, rubble-strewn bottom, I rounded a compact-car-sized boulder and found myself hovering just above a green sea turtle. About three feet long from slightly hooked beak to tip of tail, the turtle was resting on the bottom, eyes open but apparently asleep. I dropped down to take a couple of photos, then swept around the boulder and found myself in turtle central!
Four green sea turtles even bigger than the one I’d just left rested on the floor to my right, one half-in a crevice and the other three looking like they were trying to squeeze in behind him. Straight ahead a slightly smaller turtle was paddling its patient and graceful way to the surface for a breath of air. To the left three more turtles lay on various humps of coral, a little more spaced out than the ones trying to crowd into the crevice.
Dan, the dive master who had told us on the surface that he always saw at least one turtle here, hung in midwater, grinning around his regulator as he watched us try to figure out which turtle to look at – and photograph – first! As he had promised, the turtles were quite used to divers, and were not disturbed as we eased in for a closer look. Their eyes were open and they followed my clumsy progress as I maneuvered all around them, popping off photos and simply admiring them.
Green sea turtles are the most commonly seen sea turtle species around Maui. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their soft bodyparts – head, four fins, and tail – into their shells for protection. Their front fins are quite long and thick, well-shaped for paddling, and I am always amazed at the grace with which they soar through the water. They can easily outdistance a diver or snorkeler if they are feeling harassed. They’ve been federally protected for three decades now, and like the humpbacks their numbers have made a gradual recovery and are at a healthy 10,000 or so individuals.
Federal protection means it’s illegal to harass a green sea turtle, and for practical purposes, harassment means doing anything that makes them change the behavior they are exhibiting when you encounter them. So we were careful not to touch them or get close enough to inadvertently bump into them, and tried to respect their personal space bubbles as we watched them rest. I tried not to get my camera too close, so that the flash wouldn’t bother their eyes, but I did want to get facial portraits of as many as I could, since I have learned that the markings on the cheek are unique to each turtle and can act as an identifying “fingerprint.”
Dan had mentioned that these turtles seem to have preferred resting spots, and that they will sometimes jealously compete for a prime piece of real estate. If one turtle arrives to find its favorite nap zone already occupied, it may repeatedly bump the snoozer, trying to dislodge it and claim the space for itself. If that fails, it may just lie down right on top of the first turtle! Dan claims he has found turtles stacked three high on some really primo spots.
The turtles on the left had space between them and seemed to be resting happily in their spots, but the ones on the right were definitely in competition for the best position, a flat spot where the lucky possessor could wedge its head and most of its body beneath an overhanging ledge. As I watched, two turtles bumped their shells against that of the guy who’d gotten there first, both trying to muscle in and pry their competition out of its hidey-hole. One of the interlopers gave up fairly quickly, but the other one kept up the harassment, eventually nipping at the half-hidden turtle’s exposed fins and tail with some vicious-looking snaps of its curved beak.
Green sea turtles can go for 20 to 30 minutes on one lungful of air, and only one departed for the surface during the ten or so minutes we were with them. Sometimes they rise and bob along on the surface for a little while, but from the surface you'll often get just a glimpse of a softball-sized head popping up, taking a quick gulp of air, and disappearing again. They eat primarily algae, scraping it off the rocks with their slightly hooked beaks or ripping off big chunks of limu, a seaweed growing in the shallow sandy patches.
They are quite single-minded when eating, and don’t let divers, competing turtles, or anything else distract them from their determined grazing. On an earlier encounter with a single turtle at another dive site, a fellow diver and I landed on the sandy bottom, one on either side, hunkering down so that we were eye to eye with the turtle, who was maybe three feet long. It looked at each of us and went straight back to hooking and gulping strands of limu like it couldn’t care less.
In about forty-five feet of water, a little murky because of its sandy, rubble-strewn bottom, I rounded a compact-car-sized boulder and found myself hovering just above a green sea turtle. About three feet long from slightly hooked beak to tip of tail, the turtle was resting on the bottom, eyes open but apparently asleep. I dropped down to take a couple of photos, then swept around the boulder and found myself in turtle central!
Four green sea turtles even bigger than the one I’d just left rested on the floor to my right, one half-in a crevice and the other three looking like they were trying to squeeze in behind him. Straight ahead a slightly smaller turtle was paddling its patient and graceful way to the surface for a breath of air. To the left three more turtles lay on various humps of coral, a little more spaced out than the ones trying to crowd into the crevice.
Dan, the dive master who had told us on the surface that he always saw at least one turtle here, hung in midwater, grinning around his regulator as he watched us try to figure out which turtle to look at – and photograph – first! As he had promised, the turtles were quite used to divers, and were not disturbed as we eased in for a closer look. Their eyes were open and they followed my clumsy progress as I maneuvered all around them, popping off photos and simply admiring them.
Green sea turtles are the most commonly seen sea turtle species around Maui. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their soft bodyparts – head, four fins, and tail – into their shells for protection. Their front fins are quite long and thick, well-shaped for paddling, and I am always amazed at the grace with which they soar through the water. They can easily outdistance a diver or snorkeler if they are feeling harassed. They’ve been federally protected for three decades now, and like the humpbacks their numbers have made a gradual recovery and are at a healthy 10,000 or so individuals.
Federal protection means it’s illegal to harass a green sea turtle, and for practical purposes, harassment means doing anything that makes them change the behavior they are exhibiting when you encounter them. So we were careful not to touch them or get close enough to inadvertently bump into them, and tried to respect their personal space bubbles as we watched them rest. I tried not to get my camera too close, so that the flash wouldn’t bother their eyes, but I did want to get facial portraits of as many as I could, since I have learned that the markings on the cheek are unique to each turtle and can act as an identifying “fingerprint.”
Dan had mentioned that these turtles seem to have preferred resting spots, and that they will sometimes jealously compete for a prime piece of real estate. If one turtle arrives to find its favorite nap zone already occupied, it may repeatedly bump the snoozer, trying to dislodge it and claim the space for itself. If that fails, it may just lie down right on top of the first turtle! Dan claims he has found turtles stacked three high on some really primo spots.
The turtles on the left had space between them and seemed to be resting happily in their spots, but the ones on the right were definitely in competition for the best position, a flat spot where the lucky possessor could wedge its head and most of its body beneath an overhanging ledge. As I watched, two turtles bumped their shells against that of the guy who’d gotten there first, both trying to muscle in and pry their competition out of its hidey-hole. One of the interlopers gave up fairly quickly, but the other one kept up the harassment, eventually nipping at the half-hidden turtle’s exposed fins and tail with some vicious-looking snaps of its curved beak.
Green sea turtles can go for 20 to 30 minutes on one lungful of air, and only one departed for the surface during the ten or so minutes we were with them. Sometimes they rise and bob along on the surface for a little while, but from the surface you'll often get just a glimpse of a softball-sized head popping up, taking a quick gulp of air, and disappearing again. They eat primarily algae, scraping it off the rocks with their slightly hooked beaks or ripping off big chunks of limu, a seaweed growing in the shallow sandy patches.
They are quite single-minded when eating, and don’t let divers, competing turtles, or anything else distract them from their determined grazing. On an earlier encounter with a single turtle at another dive site, a fellow diver and I landed on the sandy bottom, one on either side, hunkering down so that we were eye to eye with the turtle, who was maybe three feet long. It looked at each of us and went straight back to hooking and gulping strands of limu like it couldn’t care less.
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