Diving Thoughts

According to the New Zealand Herald, 63 pilot whales beached themselves at Colville Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula on Sunday.  Department of Conservation workers and hundreds of volunteers managed to get around 2/3rds of them back out to sea, but the others died on the beach. These are being buried by Maori from a local iwi.

105 long-finned pilot whales died at Farewell Spit, which is in the north of the South Island. A tourist plane reported seeing them, but 2/3rd of them had already died by the time Department of Conservation people got there, and the others were in such a bad way that they had to be euthanised. Since it is part of a National park, these will be left to decompose.

Presumably local authorities are expecting an influx of Japanese tourists, or maybe their whaling fleet will be recalled from the Southern Ocean to take advantage of this unexpected bounty! All in the name of scientific research of course!

The full story and more photos are on the New Zealand Herald’s website.

Several websites are showing video of the deepest underwater eruption ever recorded.  The pictures show lava bursting into the water at the West Mata submarine volcano. This is about 200km south-west of Samoa. The video was taken by a robotic submersible called Jason and is over 1100 metres deep.

You can find out more and see the video from the BBC’s website.

The AHS Centaur, a hospital ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in May 1943 has been found near Brisbane in 2059m of water. There were 332 people on board when it was hit and only 64 survived. The wreck is located about 30 nautical miles east of the southern tip of Moreton Island. Filming of the wreck from an ROV is due to start in January according to David Mearns, the search director.

There are more details on the Sydney Morning Herald website.

William Lindesay OBE is presenting a lecture called “Great Wall Revisited” at The Royal Geographical Society – Hong Kong on Thursday 17 December 2009. Mr. Lindesay is the first person in modern times to walk the whole 2,500km length of the wall, in 1987, following in the footsteps of William Geil who published the first ever book on the wall in November 1909. Over the last 5 years, Mr. Lindesay has been comparing Mr. Weil’s wall of 100 years ago with the Wall today. He will be presenting photographs and commentary of this comparison.

The talk is at 2/F Olympic House, So Kong Po, Causeway Bay. Drinks Reception 6.30 pm; Lecture 7.30 pm

There are more details on the RGS – HK website.

The BBC website has a video of octopus carrying coconuts. The footage shows them dragging away halved coconut shells to use later as shelters.

You can see the video on the BBC website.

Last week some New Zealand divers doing a navigation training session got a bit more than they bargained for when a large orca and a calf swam into a reef channel near where they were.  The larger one was apparently a whale that was 7 metres long and it came within touching distance of instructor Jim Kahukoti of  Adventure Dive Gisborne.  He described it as the highlight of his 3,000 dives.

A ranger from the Department of Conservation thinks that the male  may have been teaching the calf to hunt stingray.

There’s some good photos and a video on the New Zealand Herald’s website.

Swarms of giant jellyfish are apparently causing havoc to the Japanese fishing industry by ruining nets and catches. There’s some great video on the Guardian’s website.