Back in the USA; Pics from Bonaire

I've arrived at Biscayne National Park in Florida. Now that I'm in the USA, I seem to have less connectivity. I don't have an internet connection and cell phones don't work where I live in the park. Strange when I had these things while living on small islands in the Caribbean.
I'm spending the week taking a course on motor boat operation with other folks from the park, USGS employees and University of Miami students. I don't have time to do much of a post, but I have a bunch that are partially done. Instead, I'm going to throw up a few pictures from some of my last dives in Bonaire.

Below is a picture of a PhD student from Spain, Maria, who offered to be my dive buddy on my last dives in Bonaire. Those were some of the only dives that I had a buddy. We went in at one dive site (Angel City) and floated over to a wrecked ship named the Hilma Hooker. It was a nice dive. On our previous dive we saw the largest barracuda that either of us had ever seen our lives (this is not it, but it is a good-sized barracuda). The big barracuda was absurdly large. It must have been 6 feet long or longer bigger round than me. Ah, another branching anemone. I love these things!When I was reseting coral turned over by Omar, I often woke up the night owls, the brittle stars. These stars were actually out during the day hanging on a sponge.

Fishes in the Sea Part 3: A Game of Hide and Go Eat

In previous posts (Fishes in the Sea Parts 1 and 2), I highlighted daytime invertebrate hunting and herbivorous strategies in reef fish. Let's consider more predatory (e.g., piscivorous) strategies. Being a predator can be tough work. Fish that you want to eat don't want to be eaten. Plus, sometimes damselfish beat you up just like they do to everything else (see *, **, or ***). One strategy is to be really fast and chase down prey (e.g., Bar Jacks) and another is to be cryptic and strike before you are seen.
A fish that takes on the "hide and go eat" strategy, is a trumpetfish. They're often seen floating upside-down or aligning with something straight (e.g., the trumpetfish on the left in soft coral or on the right with a pier pillar).
In a previous post on eels dying in Bonaire (Dead Eels), my video showed a Graysby closely following a sharptailed eel, perhaps using the eel to somehow increase its own foraging success. Below is a narrated (that wasn't fun) video of similar, and common, behavior, a trumpetfish following a parrotfish.



Sometimes trumpetfish will hide behind other fish, like these tang.



I've even had one use me as cover.

Grouper use a combination of burst swimming and camouflage in their hunting strategy. Like many fish, they can change their color, blending in better with their background. They don't have the skills of an octopus, but when sitting still they can be hard to see.

I've posted pictures and videos of other cryptic fish in the past, including barracuda, bat fish and scorpionfish, but I haven't posted a 3-D picture in a long time, so here's a 2D scorpionfish looking cryptic and a 3D scorpionfish blending in with the newly exposed rubble in the shallows after Omar.

The Invisibles: A Variety of Disappearing Acts

I've posted on magic tricks before, but this is different. Sometimes I spend much of my dive off of the reef and in the sand. May dive sites on Bonaire have large sandy stretches between the beach and the reef. Others have sand at the base of the reef (deep) or between the two reefs in the double-reef areas of the island (also deep). One site with vast areas of shallow sand is called "The Invisibles." I don't know how it got its name but perhaps it is because so many things living there tend to disappear. Initially all you see at this site is hovering trunkfish quietly blowing into the sand and hovering about. Every direction looks the same -- sand, blue, algae, trunkfish -- I often stare at my compass to figure out where I am. Upon close inspection of the sand, it's clear that it is teaming with life near it, in it or on it. What types of disappearing acts do you find here? Find out for yourself; find the fish in the picture below. Do you see it? It takes up about a third of the width of the picture.

Here, watch it move.


Now you can see the peacock flounder in the sand better. Given its location this one is staying sandy colored, but they can change color quickly. They have beautiful blues on them at times. (I saw several of these moving in the distance and I kept my eyes fixed on that point as I swam up to see them. Almost without fail, I failed to find them when I got to where I thought they were.)

If you've been looking for flounder, then you've found that your head is pretty much in the sand at this point, which is a good place to look for sand divers like the little one below. They actually get pretty big and they don't always hide very well, but this one is trying to disappear.
Pulling your head out of the sand and scanning across the surface, you may see many small, curved fish sitting just above the bottom. These are probably razorfish (shaped like a folded straight razor). I love what they do when you get close (see in the video).

That's are real disappearing act.

Garden eels perform a slower disappearing act which is frustrating if you want to get a picture of the cute little eels. While in a deeps sandy patch (the video below is at 90ft), I wandered into a bed of these eels. As I approached, hundreds of heads and thin, curved bodies poked out of holes in the sand. Then, as always with these eels, as I got closer they got shorter and shorter and finally disappeared.



Those are a few disappearing acts that take place under the sea. What a magical place!

Next Stop

I'm leaving Bonaire and I head to Biscayne National Park tomorrow. I have posts scheduled since I don't know when I will have connectivity again.
Ciao
jerred

Worth Reading

No. Probably not this blog, but here are some suggestions from other authors out there.

Read David Quammen's "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution" Or at least something from David Quammen. Soon. Quammen's style is captivating and his use of language hilarious. It boggles my mind, how people can write like that. If you haven't read his stuff, I suggest reading excerpts from his years of writing for Outside Magazine that can be found in "Animal Antics" or "The Boilerplate Rhino." Or just start with "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin." If you like to hear or read about peoples' lives and their story, then you'lll love it. Darwin has become an idea or an icon or a "controversial figure" or something that makes people argue. He was a man. A man with a wife and kids and problems and loss and pain and struggles just like everybody else. He happened to be good at thinking carefully about patterns and asking good questions and he happened to vomit a lot from stress, especially from social interactions. It is Quammen's dealings with Darwin's life, struggles and thoughts that make the read suitable for everyone. For example, we know that he spent 8 years working on barnacle taxonomy, but it's his life in those years which is so interesting (not that barnacle penises, among other barnacle parts, are not interesting -- they are--think about it......if your bottom is glued to the side of a ship how you gonna mate or even find a mate? It's a stretch, but think about it.). Darwin didn't think he would spend 8 years on barnacles, but he was driven to be thorough, so much so that when Darwin's young son visited another child's home, the boy asks where his friend's father "did his barnacles." Indeed, Darwin worked on the ideas for The Origin of Species for over 20 years before being "forced" to write it all down quickly as a "rough" abstract (250 pages or so) that became one of the most influential books in science. Outside of barnacles and the origins of species, Darwin did have a life to lead and Quammen's treatment of Darwin's personal life is what is captivating. The loss of his 10 year old daughter Annie, the child that he was closest to and who's company he loved (they would go on his daily walks together and he would let her brush his hair and make him up), had a profound impact on him. He wrote, "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age: she must have known how we loved her... how tenderly we do still." Outside of the loss of two young children, their son Charles also died young, Darwin and his wife Emma's greatest struggle was a fundamental difference of belief: Darwin lost his religious faith, becoming agnostic (a word created by a friend of his), while Emma remained a devoted Christian. It pained Darwin greatly knowing that his beliefs were very hard on Emma. Despite this seemingly huge difference, their letters and personal journals attest to the intense love and devotion that they had for each other throughout their marriage; she did not faulter in her love and devotion to him and he did not faulter in his for her. The extensive scientific and personal writings from Darwin truly allow some understanding of the man not just the ideas that he developed. Toward the end of his life, Darwin wrote about carnivorous plants and earthworms and when he finally had a grandchild, and he thoroughly enjoyed playing with him, he began writing an autobiography. In this case, he did not refer back to his extensive of notes from his life, but, instead, wrote a personal essay based on his perspective at the twilight of his life. He intended it to be read only by his family. Do people write for their family anymore? I don't think that most of us probably write enough. Too much work, I guess. We blog and email, call and text, instead. I guess down the road we may have records like "WHT U UP2" and other fascinating texts that we can use to explore your inner depths, but it would be good to have more. If you have people that care, write something for them. Maybe they'll want to know. Maybe they won't. They'll at least have the option.

I travel with a bookmark that I received from my friend, Balthazar, long ago. It's relevant to my travels and it reads:

Un Amigo
Es Una Cosa
Para
Guardarse
Del Lado
izquierdo
del pecho
Asi el teimpo
Y la distancia digan no

Milton Nascimento

Figure out what it says (hint: it's Spanish). Cosa = thing; izquierdo= left; pecho = chest; digan = speak

You can try something like babelfish to help you translate it. By the way, the babelfish is a creation from Douglas Adams' book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors. If you are into conservation biology and you love people that can write well and make you laugh, even on serious topics, then read Douglas Adams' "Last Chance to See." Of his books, it was his favorite. I think it's brilliant. I laughed outloud (LOL) many times from his clever manipulation of our language.

REPEATED ATTACKS!

I have evidence that Damselfish are trying to kill me (or scare me away from their little algae gardens). Here's one ticked-off damselfish. They seem especially feisty since Omar. Notice how it swims away and acts all innocent (head-fake) and then comes charging back. You can't trust 'em. This is what it's like doing surveys on the reef. Under constant attack.

Getting Bit by a Gardener

A threespot damselfish, like this one, bit me today when I was trying to upright a coral head capsized by Omar. Look at his little smug grin. You can't trust these guys for anything. Read more about damselfish in one of my earlier posts.

Salt and Slaves

Prior to refrigeration, salt was a hot commodity and often hard to come by. Bonaire was an important supplier of salt for centuries while its neighbor, Curacao, was a major slave trade center. Salt from Bonaire had a lot of ties to slavery. Slave labor was used to produce huge salt ponds for solar-salt production and to harvest the salt. It's also quite likely that many slaves from Africa that ended up on the island were purchased using salt (African tribes were often involved in capturing other Africans to sell into slavery, sometimes they were sold for salt. Apparently, the word salary comes from payment in salt.). Slave huts from this time still exist on Bonaire and two dive sites, White Slave (pictured here as I entered the water) and Red Slave, are named for the obelisks on the shore that signaled where boats could pick up their salt load.
With the abolishment of slavery in 1863, the salt mining here ended for about a century. When solar salt production returned to the island, heavy machinery, conveyer belts and large piers were employed to produce the salt.

The salt pier that was constructed provides an eerie dive site; its pillars provide vertical substrate for encrusting organisms, like these sponges (do you see the fish hiding in this picture?).

Many fish, like these schoolmaster snappers, also hang out under the pier and near the pillars (these guys are waiting for evening to hunt). Just the other side of the road from the pier are huge mountains of salt. Just looking at these mountains makes my blood pressure skyrocket. The salt is loaded on a conveyor belt near these mountains and it is carried above the road, down the peir and dumped onto cargo ships. Much of the salt is never consumed, but it ends up in water softeners and on our roads in the winter.
The salt ponds used to produce these huge mountains typically have a pink or brown color. In the picture below from fisheyephoto.com and my picture above, you can see the color of the ponds. Why are the ponds pink? Sea water isn't pink. Think about your microbiology. Not many things can live in such hypersaline environments.....ya know, they'd have to be really halophilic (latin: halo=salt or "the sea" and philic = love). Really, they'd have to be extreme halophiles. Yeah. They are. Prokaryotes in the group archaea (organisms formerly known as types of bacteria) live in these ponds and their pigments used in photosynthesis color the water. You can go archaea watching closer to home. They're often seen in hotsprings (extreme thermophiles) and salt lakes. Other species live in your intestines.