Alert Diver Category : Rencontres

OF ALL THE FISHES IN THE SEA THAT ANNA ADORES, blennies perch high atop her favorites list. Her fascination with the tribe of typically small, hole-inhabiting bottom-dwellers …

IT HAD BEEN A BUSY WEEK for the fish surveyors aboard the Avalon ll, and things were just beginning to wind down. The Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) team of 16 volunteer research divers had recorded population estimates for 246 fish species on 26 reef, seagrass, mangrove, and ironshore sites within the benevolent boundaries of […]

TO FIND THE FIRST DESCRIPTION OF A LARVAL PEARLFISH in the wild, I had to search back to the early 1980s annals of blackwater diving and Christopher Newbert’s account of drifting 40 feet down a lighted downline tethered to a dinghy bobbing on a night sea somewhere off the Kona, Hawaiʻi, coast. The story appeared […]

Pour le plus grand bonheur des plongeurs qui séjournent au Tawali Resort, sur les rives de Milne Bay, en Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, l'intuition d'Anna s'est révélée juste.

NOTRE RÉCENTE AVENTURE SOUS L'EAU a commencé par une quête fantaisiste d'un petit poisson discret, pas plus grand qu'une pièce de cinq cents. À bien des égards, notre mini-mission à la recherche de l'hippocampe nain (Hippocampus zosterae), rarement observé, ressemblait davantage à un week-end de jeunes insouciants qu'à un groupe de sept hommes et femmes enfilant des combinaisons de plongée le long du rivage en dur des hauts-fonds rarement explorés de la baie de Floride à Key Largo, en Floride. 

DEPUIS LA FIN DU XIXe siècle, les taxonomistes marins débattent du statut d'espèce des petits bars majestueux des Caraïbes du genre Hypoplectrus, communément appelés hameçons. Au cœur de la controverse se trouve l'essence même de la taxonomie : Qu'est-ce qui définit une espèce ?

MANY JAPANESE DIVERS LOVE UNDERSEA CREATURES, particularly the home-grown varieties living in abundance along the country’s craggy volcanic coastlines and offshore islands. They also have an infatuation for the eccentric — the stranger the better.

On our first trip to Hachijō-jima in 2015, we were in the company of friends on a mission to photograph a scientifically undocumented pygmy seahorse the size of a pumpkin seed. Even after a concerted four-day search, the tiny target eluded our efforts until a single seahorse miraculously materialized in the last minutes of the last dive on the last day.

What diver isn’t enchanted by an octopus, especially a beguiling beauty with the reputation of an assassin? Even though we searched for legendary blue-ringed octopuses across their territorial waters of the Asia-Pacific, it took five years before we made our first sighting in Lembeh Strait.

Most decorator crabs belong to one of eight families in the superfamily Majoidea, commonly referred to as spider crabs. About 75 percent of the group’s more than 1,100 global species mask their presence by wearing disguises made from living organisms scissored from the landscape. They commonly hijack seaweeds, sponges, tunicates, bryozoans and hydroids. The crabs manipulate the purloined pieces of attire with their mouths before attaching them to one of the many fishhook-shaped bristles arranged in rows on the carapace, rostrum, walking legs and claw arms, depending on the species.