Category Archives: Macro

Dominica, Macro

Have you ever explored underneath a pier, jetty or bridge?

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Photographer under the pier
There are a lot of dives that I have done where the boat ride to the dive site can be quite long. Have long boat rides guaranteed a great dive experience, unfortunately no. Curiously, sometimes the shortest boat rides have yielded some great dives, particularly if there if there is some man-made structure in the area. Curiously, sometimes the local pier, jetty or bridge provide opportunities for divers to explore the underwater world and find some interesting sea creatures. Arrow crab

Not long ago we did a dive near a pier in Dominica. It started out late in the afternoon so the light was very low. When I reached the bottom at about 35 feet the first thing I found was an old paint bucket with sponges growing out of it. It was a little surreal, but it is not the first time I have seen what might seem like trash being re-purposed. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for trash in the oceans. Nevertheless, I am less surprised now than in the past that sometimes sea creatures are able to re-purpose what someone intended to throw away. Similarly, the posts that were set into the sea floor also create structure in which sea creatures may make a home. Upside down shrimp
Even larger animals seem to find hiding holes for themselves. dominica blog-1
cataloguing the creature we saw in a one hour dive was hard. In part because I kept switching back and forth between still shots and video, but in part because the sheer number of creatures and their variety. We saw a variety of shrimp and crabs. We saw several species of puffer fish. We saw a slipper lobster. And we saw several seahorses.
dominica blog 3-1

So the next time you are driving by a pier, jetty or bridge, maybe you should ask yourself: “I wonder if I ought to go explore it and see if there are any interesting sea creatures?”

Here is a short video from the dive.

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

Bioflourescence, Macro

What does blue light tell us?

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Brain coral bio-flourescence
Brain coral bio-flourescence

A couple of years ago while we were diving in the Caymans I was introduced to bio-flourescence. Prior to that trip, I had been on a number of night dives over the years so I was accustomed to the thought of turning off all of the dive lights and moving your hands about to stir the water to see plankton luminesce or glow in the dark. Okay it was interesting but that was about as far as I got.

Bio-luminesce seemed to be different. Instead of turning off all of the lights we added a blue light, not black light as we all saw in our youths. We added some yellow filters and blue light filters for my strobes. Voila certain critters changed colors and glowed in the dark.

Bahamas anenome under blue light
Giant anemone under blue light

So I was no longer looking at pint sized critters who glowed for a moment or two; now I was looking at much larger corals and creatures that glowed green or other colors, as long as I turned the blue light on them. Cool. What appeared to be the difference between bioluminesce and bio-flourescene was the use of blue lights which which would cause a glowing for more than a few seconds.

After thinking about it for a while, I began to wonder if there was any practical applications for being able to see bio-flourescense. Turns out there is. From my readings it appears that the proteins that glow under blue light can be useful in helping to identify cancerous cells. Hmmm that is kind of interesting. It also turns out that when blue light hits juvenile corals it also glows. Now I am not a scientist, but it would seem to me that that type of information would be useful in identifying whether new corals are growing on a reef or not. Turns out there is some research being done along the lines of using blue light to identify new growth coral. Now that seems to me would be useful in helping to identify whether a reef was growing with new corals, was stagnat or dying. I could see if studied under controlled conditions it would be very useful to identify the health of at least the portion of the reef which would bio-flouresce. I suspect there are still more practical appications for blue light underwater than have yet been considered. So maybe blue light will unlock even more secrets of the oceans and nature and is more than just a cool sight.