Blue pictures!

.
Phooey!  I forgot to set the camera on "Underwater" and so lost the colors to blue.  Water looks blue for the same reason the sky looks blue, something to do with light being absorbed.  I'm not going to do a science class here!  OK, the deeper you dive, the less color you see, red disappearing first, then yellow.
 .
Back when I was teaching scuba, if there was a woman wearing red nail polish, I'd always catch her hand for a moment and show her her fingernails that looked black at sity feet deep.  Eeek!  And sometimes I'd have a red tank, and folks would always comment about how it looked black at depth.
.
So, today I must go try to find these wonderful creatures again, wish me luck!  I was in about 25 to fourty feet depth, 8 to 12 meters, or thereabouts.
.

Hey!  A Batfish!  First one I've seen here.  Doesn't even look like a fish.  They spend alot of time buried in the sand, I might never see him again.








.
.

Oboy!  And what's this?  Is it looking at me??










.
.

Here comes a ray, looking for lunch.










.
.

I am not his lunch!  They make a sort of plunger with their whole body, and whumph whumph up and down, and that's how they excavate craters in the sand.  Whatever is trying to hide down in the sand had better be digging for its' life!



.
.

A Trunkfish is attracted by the action.  Perhaps the ray will miss a tidbit.

The little things sticking up in the sand in the background are Garden Eels.  About a foot  1/3 m, long, they live in their holes, and munch what food specks float by.  They're afraid of bubbles, so I cannot show you closeup photos of them.  I wonder when they ever come out of their burroughs???

.

The show goes on, so to speak.
.
The ray decides to check out a new location...








.
.

A Queen Conch?  There are about a dozen conchs, the seashell thing, that live in this sandy area.  They are all really old, their shells are very thick.
Conchs live five to seven years, and reach sexual maturity at about three years of age.  They lay egg clutches that have as many as 250,000 eggs!
.
The ray seems to be looking for something, eggs?  This conch isn't laying right now, but two others I found this day were.
.

Here's one of the ladies doing her best to make baby conchs.  Pronounced: Konk, remember.

Both conchs that were laying eggs were up against bits of dead coral.  I wonder if there's any significance to that?

 .

Just to show you, I grabbed a wandering conch and turned him up to show you how thick the 'skirt' of the shell has grown, or become with the animal laying down layer after thin layer of the pearly-pink ?? shell material.  It has a name, but I can't quite think of it right now.  I'll phone you at three am and tell you the word.  That's when I wake up at night with the right answers! (I am joking!)

So if the ray finds and eats all the egg bundles, that means no more of these Queen Conchs. And the ray has nothing more to do than go around looking for food.  If there was a 'normal' unharvested-by-humans population, there would be plenty of eggs for the ray to have some.  There would be at least two hundred conchs here, probably many more.

.

I saw one place like this off Grand Turk Island where the shallow sand area must have been hundreds of acres, unlike this five acre, 2 hectares, place with the dozen or so animals.  The old conchs like these were about three feet, 1m, apart for as far as the eye could see, or the human could swim.  Thousands.

.

So I guess that's how populations collapse.  Such a sad subject.  I wish there could be a World moratorium on fishing for fifteen years!  Or longer!  The "Blue Planet" series on TV is making folks believe out oceans and seas are in great shape, when they are not.  I stopped, quit, gave up my side of a conversation with a lot of well travelled scubadivers on a discussion group that I participate in.  Of course, when they go on their one week vacation, their resort dive operation is going to show them only the very best places, not the usual, or empty reefs.  Owell.  Ha, and they all want to eat frsh fish for dinner!  Oh, my.

.

I do show you the best 3% of what I see diving.  You wouldn't come back otherwise.  Oooo, grouchy me!

.

So, hopefully, I'll have some GREAT photos tomorrow for you, when I go back and find those strange boogies and have the dumb-stupid-duh camera on the righ setting!  When will they integrate a depth gauge into a camera's light and color setting????

.

OK!  Thanks for stopping by!

.

.