Category Archives: Curacao

Curacao, Macro

Have you gotten lost in the underwater small small world of Curacao?

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Fire worm detail
Fire worm on star coral

Typically, when I get to a dive site that I have not been to before, my initial thought is to use my wide angle lens so I can try to take pictures of the large reef structures and any fish aggregations so that I will have a general sense of what a particular dive site is like. Most of the time I dive with groups, so if I am shooting wide angle the challenge is to only have one or perhaps two divers in the image. I usually do alright at keeping up with the group, although by buddy says I am pretty slow and tend to be at the back of the group.

Nevertheless, there are times when I pull out the macro lens to take underwater pictures. A trip we took to Curacao not to long ago was one trip were I was glad I had packed the macro lens. We dove with Ocean Encounters, which is an excellent shop. Good safety briefings, skilled and well trained staff and solid equipment. One of the dive leaders we dove with on several dives was Pol Bosh. Pol is extraordinary at finding the small critters that live on the reef system in Curacao. Curacao has quite a few sea hares which are shell-less mollusks. One such sea hare he found was a Petalifera Romosa.

From the gastropod family
A sea hare my friend Pol pointed out in Curacao
This Petalifera Romosa was perhaps at most an inch in length, yet with a macro lens it looks fairly large. This sea hare dwarfed some of the other sea hares that Pol found and were at most only about a quarter of an inch or a centimeter in length. (I wish my eyes were that sharp and could readily spot creatures that small).

Pol was also quite skilled at finding arrow crabs.

Arrow crab and sea anemone
Arrow crab and sea anemone

Curacao does have a multitude of macro subjects. So typically I was way at the back of the group with my buddy trying to hurry me along.

Frozen in time
Four-eyed butterfly fish and gobey

I hope we get to go back to Curacao to get lost in the small small world of creatures that live off of its shores.

A hungry blue tang
Blue tang grazing on algae

Bahamas, Barbardos, Belize, Cayman Islands, Curacao, Dominica, Mexico, Roatan, wide angle

Are you the scourge of the Caribbean?

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Are you the scourge of the Caribbean?
Pretty but lethal?

Over the last decade or so we have been making our way around the Caribbean. My first encounter with a Lion fish was about 10 years ago when I heard that this invasive species from the Indo-Pacific region was slowing making its way around the Caribbean. I cannot say that I have been to every island in the region, but I have come close. I have seen them as far south as Tobaggo. I’ve seen them as far north as Florida. I have seen them as far east as Barbados. I have seen them as far west as Roatan, Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. Lion fish are eating and reproducing machines. A marine biologist in Belize told me that the female lion fish produces about 40,000 eggs every 3 days. The reproductive ability of rabbits pale by comparison.

One of my friends in Barbados let me know that last week his shop shot 90 lion fish while my friends in Roatan shot over 130 last week. There are lion fish round ups throughout the Caribbean. I have seen roundups in the Caymans, and Curacao and Belize. Ultimately, the lion fish has no natural predators in the Caribbean. Although there have been efforts to train moray eels, groupers and sharks to feed on them, often it still requires the spearing of the fish in the first instance. I don’t know what the answer is, but I certainly hope we find a better answer than we have now because from what I have seen we appear to be losing the battle.

Some might say so what. The problem is that with depleted native species, like parrot fish and others who eat the algae off the reef the reefs could eventually die out. I think about the great limpet that only resides in Monterrey bay and wonder, can we really afford such a loss. There are proteins that are created by the great limpet that make cancer drugs more effective and which at the present have not yet been synthesized. The proteins from the limpid sell for about $34,000 per gram or more than 600 times the price of gold. I wonder can we afford to lose even one species of flora or fauna in the Caribbean? I keep wondering if there is a better solution to removing this invasive species. Yet at the same time i think about instances in which people have introduced one invasive species to remove another and those efforts have gone terribly wrong,consider africanized bees….