Snorkel pictures!

As promised, here are some exciting snorkeling pictures!

Here are some pictures of cushion stars and their associated shrimp. One of our students, Eric, is doing a project on the relationship between the two. They are pretty cute.

Here I am snorkeling! I look pretty awkward in the water- that is almost a 'queen wave'- but I'll work on that.

 The reef near the Hilton (where we went to snorkel) is really cool and 3-dimensional looking. This makes for some cool optical illusions. This picture looks like it is two morphed into one or something.

There are lots of amazing fishes on the reefs. It is often hard to get a good picture of them because they move so quickly! I captured these two butterfly fishes, and it's probably the best fish picture I got all day.

I love the way the water surface looks from underwater. This picture makes me feel like I am the littler mermaid! 

 This spiny guy is the voracious crown-of-thorns sea star. Periodically it will have outbreaks and devour the reef. The spines have a poison that isn't very pleasant, so I vetoed a student project that wanted to focus on them. I have no more interest in going to the hospital, thank you very much!

 

This is a beautiful tridacna clam. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours in the reef. One of the students made a comment about how our 18-girl and 3-boy contingent is a clam jam. I’ll let you interpret that as you will!

This fuzzy picture of a hole is actually a picture of an octopus, Octopus cyanea. I’ve seen three of them now, and they are one of the species that Jenny studies. You can see the white eye in the top middle of the picture there, and some little suckers in the bottom of the picture. It is too bad I couldn’t get a better picture; next time I’ll have to take video and try to capture the awesome colour changing abilities of these fun guys.

 

These are some of my favorite creatures on the reef, known as ‘christmas tree worms’. They are burrowing worms who filter feed on plankton after burrowing into a coral head. They have brilliant colours, ranging from yellows, oranges, greens, blues and reds. One of our students is doing a project on how they are dispersed in the reef and how that relates to the various currents of the water. I am pretty excited about this project, because it’s the sort of thing I would have done if I were a student here.

I really like this picture showing some live corals. It’s kind of how I imagine a reef looking. The small branching one a bit to the left is Acropora, and the other chunky looking one more to the right I think is Pocillopora. I am working on my reef creature identification skills, so correct me if I ever get this stuff wrong (Julie, I’m looking at you here!).

 

This spiny Diadema urchin is of the same type that spined one of my students. I’m working on getting some pictures of that incident, since I am hoping it won’t happen again! Her foot has actually healed up pretty well.

Unfortunately this poor sea cucumber did not fare so well. The poor guy is going to have a hard time scuttling about now with all those spines in him/her.

Another fish picture that worked! I have a million pictures of fish butts, so I have to celebrate when I actually capture their faces. This guy I think is a lemonpeel angelfish, though it’s quite a bit more orange than some of the others I have seen around.

  

This is Jenny. She has picked up a triton here, I think ‘triton’s trumpet’. I am going off of our reef creature ID book, and the fact it looks like triton’s trumpet from the little mermaid. You may at this point realize that all of my marine ID skills come from the little mermaid or from finding nemo. This is why it’s great to have a buddy like Jenny to swim around with! She knows what is safe to pick up or not, which makes things a lot more fun, and definitely more safe. I almost picked up a cone shell last week (which is a nasty venomous snail that can kill you). Woops!

These two pictures are some of my favorite fish! They are the spotted daschylus, a type of fish that associates with anemones (like nemo!). One of our students is looking at personality in these fishes, and as much as I don’t like ‘behavioural syndrome’ work (because it basically aims to ‘explain’ why behavioural variation exists, in an adaptive way, and is statistically flawed, but that’s another rant), her project will be pretty cool. I think they live in family groups, but as far as I know they are a pretty under-studied fish. I like the more territorial fish like these guys, because they don’t run away nearly so quickly, and you know where to find them. Also, I love symbiosis, so anemone fish rock my ocean world!

This spiny fellow is another urchin- Echinometra- which is a bit friendlier than the Diadema. One student project is going to look at the various urchins and their relationship to sunlight. They will move their spines towards you when they sense a shadow, which can be a bit disconcerting. Many of our night snorkelers have seen this quite dramatically when they are out there with their dive lights. I am hoping to get out night snorkeling soon- be prepared for a whole new batch of sea creature pictures when that happens!

And last but not least, the beautiful rainbow wrasses. I have to go drive around some people (my main job is as chauffeur here!), so I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoyed my sea creature pictures!