Friday, July 17, 2009

A Giant Hermit! And other sandy things.

 
These are juvenile, I thimmk, Jackknife fish.  Teeny tiny cuties!  Swimming back and forth, back and forth.  Quite a current today.  Oh, and a Bridaled Blennie.  Or two.  The sand is beginning to grow red algae.  Since there's so much Sahara Dust this year, and the Sea is so warm, I bet there'll be a lot of this mucky stuff this summer.  Ugh. Owell. 
Isn't that something?  Dust storms so bad there that the dust goes high enough in the sky to blow here all the way across the Atlantic.  It's nasty stuff, full of microbes and their insecticides and chemicals
.

 
.
A Milk Conch.  Pretty, near white shell.  Much smaller than a Queen Conch.  I picked him/her up just to take a photo for you.
.

 
As I swam toward this guy, I was seeing the back, and it being up sideways, I was getting grouchy that I'd found another murder scene.  Swam around front, and big surprise!  A Giant Hermit Crab! 
.

 
After a short wait, he gradually came out of his Queen Conch shell home, and just sort of sat there.
.















What a face!  So many feathery and pokey thingies around his mouth.  Wish I'd had something to feed him, to see him fiddling with it.  I'll have to start taking a bit of frozen squid along on my dives.  Or maybe a hot dog.  One time junk food wouldn't hurt.  Once I left two little lobsters madly gobbling hotdogs.  They may be craving another hot dog to this day, poor guys.
.
 
Oh!  A little turtle.  I won't go any closer, don't want to chase and frighten.
.

 
Ah, up she goes to get a breath of air.  We're in deepish water, sixty feet, 20m.  She's going very slowly.  "She" because the guys have long tails.
.
.













A long way up.  Mystical.  Timeless.  Hundreds of million years, they've been doing just this, going for air.
.
Bonk, back down in the sand with me.  This is a cucumber!  Yes!  A Furry Sea Cucumber.  Soft, soft, soft.  I used to touch them, but why?  Related to Starfish, Sea Stars.  
.















The front end.  They never complain, criticize, or fight.  They can't!  They don't have a face!  hahaha!
.
 
 Little turtle again.  I wasn't nearly as close as this looks, the sea was very clear.  She seems to really like the tiny bits of seaweed she's eating.  The seaweed is in the foreground, those things behind her are Garden Eels.  One is peeking out of its' retreat near the turtle's head.  A post about them sometime.
.
Oboy!  I'm really on Island Time today, meaning late.  OK  So much more on this dive.  I'll dive again today, but probably late, five or so, two hours before sunset.  Even the longest days here are short.  Solstice to solstice is thirteen hours to eleven hour long days.
.
Thanks for stopping by!
.

No comments:

Post a Comment