|
|
By Amber, on June 28, 2011, at 9:56 pm Blog note: because I am tired and lazy, here is the text of the speech I gave tonight at Toastmasters, and a photo you have already seen. I won Best Speaker!
Humans are predators. Our eyes are in the front of our heads. Our stomachs contain specific enzymes that break down meat. Our ancestors made tools and became skilled hunters, capable of killing much larger and stronger animals. Our brains, say scientists, would not have become as large and as capable as they are had we not been eating all that meat.
But we are too good as predators. Throughout our history we’ve nearly wiped out many traditional food sources that used to fill the plains and the seas, like bison and sea turtles. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Cayman Islands, he called them ‘Las Tortugas’ because sea turtles were so numerous in the surrounding waters that it seemed one might be able to walk across their backs.
Sometimes the predatory ways of our species are not food-based, but fear-based, or even superstition-based. All three reasons are cause for a dramatic decline in the world’s shark population — some Atlantic species are down as much as 80%. Up to 73 million sharks are killed every year, and a large contributor is the practice of finning, where a shark’s dorsal fin is sliced off to be sold at up to $300/lb for shark fin soup and the shark is released back to the ocean, where it dies if it is not already dead. Removing these top predators from an ecosystem can cause terrible imbalance as sick fish and lower predators are not removed. These lower predators like to eat the same things we do, like tuna and scallops. Sharks keep the ocean population healthy, strong, and diverse all the way down to the bottom of the food chain.
I went Playa del Carmen recently, where I learned something interesting. From November to February, bull sharks gather in the waters off Playa to give birth. Scuba divers from around the world come to see the sharks and each diver pays around $100-$150 per dive. This past November, a fisherman from a nearby town killed nine of those sharks, including seven females that were gestating a total of 50 pups. Dying sharks release a chemical into the water that other sharks can detect, and the remaining sharks stayed away for the rest of the season.
That fisherman probably made up to $1800 total by selling the sharks to a middleman who could resell them to an exporter, who would in turn make much more for the individual parts on the international market. And the whole Playa tourism industry, from the dive shops to the hotels and restaurants, lost tens of millions for the season. They will almost certainly lose more in the coming years, now that an entire future generation of bull sharks has been wiped out.
The amazing thing is that the fisherman was completely within his legal rights in Mexico. A lot of people around the world are working very hard to conserve shark populations and to create marine sanctuaries, including in Playa. In January, the Shark Conservation Act was signed into law in the US, disincentivizing fisherman from the practice of finning by requiring them to keep entire body, which is worth very little to most people. It also allows the US to refuse seafood imports from countries that allow finning.
There is still so much to be done. Maybe you’re like me, and you’ve encountered a shark on a dive, in which case you already know what a magical experience that is, and I don’t have to sell you on shark conservation. Or maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I’d be more interested in diving if it weren’t for sharks.” But without sharks, you can say goodbye to healthy reefs. There won’t be much to dive for.
If you care about sharks, or ecology, or even if you just like to eat seafood – especially if you just like to eat seafood — I encourage you to seek out any of the many marine conservation agencies around the world, like Oceana or Shark Allies, and do some reading about what’s happening and how we can stop it. I have three things you can do right now: don’t buy shark products other than fossils, don’t eat shark fin soup, and consider not patronizing restaurants that serve shark fin soup (and telling the manager why). Finning is a brutal and disastrous practice, and it’s up to us to stop it.
By Amber, on April 19, 2011, at 9:30 pm Chac who?
Our last dive day was a trip to two of the Yucatan’s many cenotes, caverns filled with fresh water. You don’t have to be a certified cave diver to dive these (and thank goodness, because cave diving terrifies me and I don’t see that certification in my future), but you do have to go with one. First he reassures you that, because cavern diving requires you to stay within visual distance of surface light, he will be able to get you to the surface in seconds if necessary. Phew! Then he gives you the lecture about how you had better not touch a single thing inside the cenote, including the guide rope that you will be following, because everything (with the exception of the rope) took thousands of years to form and will never regrow now that it’s full of water. Hope you’re feeling good about your buoyancy control!
We went into Kukulkan (the easier of the two) first, so we could get a feel for things and so he could make sure we weren’t idiots. Down at a certain depth there is a halocline, where all that crystal-clear fresh water sits on top of salt water. When you swim through that layer and it mixes, everything looks very blurry (freaky if you weren’t expecting it; still slightly freaky if you were). It got kicked up in front of me and when we came up from that dive, I said, “Hey, what was that sign that said ‘stop’ and had the grim reaper on it?” The instructor said, “Oh, yeah, I don’t tell people about that.”
 click for source page It says that more than 300 people have died while diving in caves, including instructors. In case you get down there and realize your Spanish is rusty, this conveys a similar message in a more rudimentary way (the haziness is the halocline, only slightly stirred up here):
 click for source page But it’s not all death and stuff. Once you get comfortable, the views are absolutely amazing (I have had to steal other people’s photos for this post because I wanted to stay focused on surviving the experience and not touching anything):
 click to see a few more incredible cenote photos by the same photographer If you are a diver and you find yourself in the Yucatan, you have to try this (shout-out to the dive shop we used — loved them!). You won’t have this experience anywhere else in the world. We are looking at going back to Playa someday to do our advanced open water certification, since diving the cenotes counts as a peak performance buoyancy dive. Speaking of buoyancy, the cenotes are an awesome confidence-builder for that. I surprised myself with how well I did — even though I became horribly anxious when we temporarily surfaced in the air dome in Chac Mool, inflated our BCDs, and I knew I would have to redo my buoyancy just in time to swim back through enormous, irreplaceable stalactites.
And no, I didn’t touch anything. :)
By Amber, on April 17, 2011, at 10:00 pm Hey, I learned a trick!
I figured out how to get all that blue out of my photos! I went back and did it for the last crop, but I’m not going to sub them into that post unless someone really cares. I will assume you do not. :) (BTW, those are french angelfish, another species with an interesting juvenile phase.)
Yellow stingray:
The dive that tonight’s entire batch of photos comes from was a carpet reef called ‘Tortugas,’ known for these giant turtles (the little yellow wrasses are probably 4-6″), of which we only saw a couple. I only photographed one, which is why you’re getting turtle butt:
Big ol’ delicious-looking mystery fish, at least 2.5′ and 60 lbs or more. Mark was pretending to spear him and his friends as we drifted by:
Pair of triggerfish. Triggerfish are neat because they don’t look like much but they are one of the few fish you can buy to take on a mantis shrimp, which will otherwise happily eat everything in your saltwater aquarium:
 I really don’t know what this is:
 Finally, the most exciting part of the dive: the bull shark that we saw at the very end! Almost every diver hopes to see a shark, but it’s rare to just happen across one on a reef — we got about 5′ from a reef shark in the Caymans, which was lucky. They’re really not interested in divers and generally prefer to stay away. Bull sharks congregate in Playa when the water is cold, but move on when it starts to get warm in March/April. Many divers come to Playa specifically to see them, so when some fisherman massacred a bunch of them this season to sell the fins, the remaining sharks fled and Playa lost out on tens of millions of dollars in tourist revenue. A few stragglers came back at the end of the season, but the consensus among the dive industry folks was that they were gone for the year. Our divemaster was thrilled to see this one, which we guessed was around 400 lbs and 6-7′, and speculated that it was probably the last she’d see for the season:
This was a drift dive, so the boat captain was supposed to watch for our inflatable marker to surface and motor over while we did our safety stop, but when we surfaced he was nowhere to be seen and we had to wait for 15 minutes. I got so seasick bobbing around in the 4-5′ waves that once we got into the boat I couldn’t even put my fins back on to do the next dive. Boo. That’s the last time I skip my motion sickness patch. I have been on plenty of boats without getting sick, but I started wearing the patch just in case and now apparently I need it!
By Amber, on April 14, 2011, at 9:30 pm Snaps from our first two dives. You see pretty much the same fish all over the Caribbean, and I’ve been there enough times now that I no longer come back with several hundred reef shots, but I have to take some! My camera tags along on every dive because you never know when you’re going to see something special. I use an underwater housing for my little Canon point & shoot, and it does well enough, but (Dear Santa,) what I’d really like is a nice Sea & Sea setup (and a trip to Thailand). Just sayin’. :)
I like this shot because it looks to me like the puffer on the left, the parrotfish in the middle, and the blue tang on the right are laughing:
Some little highhats, and our divemaster reaching for the arrow crab that was my photo of the day:
My favorite frogman:
Grunts schooling under a ledge:
Grunt close-up:
Follow the jump for a few more!
Continue reading Playa del Carmen: under the sea, part 1
By Amber, on July 1, 2010, at 10:11 pm One of the coolest dives we did in Hawaii was a wrecked Corsair from 1946. It sits in about 110′ of water off the southeast end of Oahu. Apparently the pilot just ran out of fuel during a training run. Whoops! Bad for him, awesome for us. We dove that site twice — once in the morning, once at dusk. Both times we saw tons of schooling fish, including a monster amberjack. During the morning dive we saw some freedivers spearfishing at the site (I think Mark wanted to swim over and join them!).
It’s tricky to get photos down there because there are changing currents and you only get about 15 minutes of bottom time under normal recreational diving conditions, so my approach is to snap away and hope I get a few good ones. Here are some of my favorites!
One last one — I took this on the way back up the mooring line. We had a couple safety stops with nothing to do but hang on, and we were treated to a ballet of pennant butterflies:
By Amber, on June 22, 2010, at 10:00 pm You may not know this, but I’ve been away for a couple weeks.
Mark was there, too.
We did some sightseeing…
And made friends with some locals:
We had a great time, but how quickly vacation ends. I have approximately one trillion photos between the two cameras that I brought so it may take a while, but I’ll share more as I get them uploaded!
|
|
