Diving Thoughts

This is a photo from the Guardian’s website. It is the first of a sequence of 5 of a great white shark investigating three divers in a cage in Mexico. Unfortunately they seem more interested in emphasising that one of the divers is “fending” off the shark, and punching it on the nose, when his hand doesn’t look as though it’s anywhere near its nose. Having said that his hand is definitely touching the shark. The second diver looks as though he would have got some close-up shots too. Meanwhile their mate is bravely hiding behind them both, at back of the cage – just where I would have been!

Anyway it’s quite a good sequence of photos in lovely clear blue water. You can see them on the Guardian’s website.

OK, so they don’t surface in the middle of the night, crawl up the beach, climb trees and start snacking on coconut leaves. Instead scientists artificially fed one of the most common species of deep sea fish on plants, and in doing so they demonstrated that these fish have much wider tastes than previously thought. The implication is that fish may take advantage of terrestrial plants that have been blown or washed into the seas. Dr. Rachel Jeffreys of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research is asking “Because these fish are eating spinach could they then possibly feed on phytodetritus and so be affected by changes in phytoplankton communities as a result of climate change?”.

Researchers used a rig containing spinach as bait and a video camera was placed at a depth of 3000 metres. Soon afterwards 3 species of fish, grenadiers (Coryphaenoides armatus and C. mediterraneus) and cusk eels (Spectunculus sp) were seen eating the spinach.

You can read more and see a video of the fish feeding on the Earth News section of the BBC’s website.

On their website the BBC has got some footage of Japan’s secretive and rarely seen Akame fish. You can see it on the BBC website.

An 18 foot whale shark was found last week in Bahay Kambing, a cove in the municipality of Tingloy, by some divers, including several from Hong Kong. Its dorsal and pectoral fins had all been cut off and there were rope marks on its tail. It was towed to Caban cove which was calmer and volunteers tried to help it. Unfortunately it died in the night from its injuries.

Having been fortunate enough to see a similarly sized whale shark in Thailand, this is very sad.

Whale sharks are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and they are protected under Philippine law. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have made much difference in this case.

The photo above was taken from WWF-Philippines website, where they have a long article on this.

Here’s another photo and a link to an article, this time from the Philippine Star’s website.

I’ve also seen a number of photos on Facebook, so the incident is becoming more widely reported worldwide.

There’s also a thread on Scubaboard’s forum.

According to a couple of the articles I read, “locals” have suggested that the whale shark may have become entangled in a fishing net, and had its fins off in order to recover the net! Several years ago in Hong Kong during a shallow night dive a bunch of squid fishermen turned up. Since lights attract the squid, they no doubt concluded that underwater dive lights would be even better at attracting them, so they dropped nets around 3 pairs of divers. It’s a good job they didn’t apply the same logic as these Philippine “locals”, otherwise we’d have got 6 divers back with no arms and legs left.

Presumably if these “locals” are to be believed and saving the nets were the priority, the fins would have been discarded and no-one would dream of selling them for USD 800 per kilo. And I’m not convinced that under Philippine law that it makes any difference why you kill a protected animal, it is still illegal. I don’t think I’m alone in that view as apparently WWF-Philippines and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) have announced a reward of P100,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the people involved.

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh took the bathyscaphe Trieste to 10,900 metres deep in the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. This was in 1960 and they are the only people to have reached such a depth. As they reached the bottom they were surprised to see a flatfish swimming by, which means that there is life at these huge depths.

Now the BBC has got a good article on the different types of life that live in the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. There are 37 oceanic trenches around the world and they are narrow canyons on the sea floor, beyond the abyss (3,000 – 6,000 metres), going down to around 11,000 metres.

Over the past few years, the Hadeep team at Oceanlab has been exploring these trenches using a remotely operated vehicle called the Hadal Lander. The life they have found doesn’t look as unusual as the creatures from around 1,000 metres deep. This may be because there is more food and organic matter that has sunk to the bottom of the trenches, compared with what fish would find in mid-water much shallower.

You can see some video of these creatures and a good article on the BBC’s website.

The Guardian has got some great photos of humpback whales feeding off Chatham Strait in south-east Alaska. You can see them on Guardian’s website.

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.

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.

The BBC are featuring some photos of deep sea creatures from the International Census for Marine Life.

You can see their photos on the BBC website.

Something that might interest UK divers – the BBC has a series of photographs of vulnerable marine creatures on its website.