I did a post a short while ago with some of my favourite photos of pairs of marine creatures. Some of them are routinely found in large groups – more on that in some other posts – but other times it’s a surprise to encounter more than one individual in an area.
For example, it’s unusual for us to see more than one klipfish together. When we do, they are usually chasing each other (they seem to be quite territorial) or trying to impregnate one another (equally aggressively). These two look as though they’re snuggling together for safety in the hostile vastness of the ocean!
Cuddling klipfish
Other times, it isn’t that odd to see marine animals of the same type grouped together. Barehead gobies are incredibly common – particularly at Long Beach – and can often be seen having mothers’ meetings together on the sand. Kate thought of them as her friends, watching out for her…
Barehead gobies at Long Beach
I’ve posted this next picture (or a variant of it) before, but I think it’s lovely. Pyjama catsharks are nocturnal, and during the day they like to sleep piled on top of one another in sheltered places like gullies and, if available, pipelines and wrecks. Here’s a pile-on at Long Beach that we found early one evening.
Napping pyjama catsharks
There’s a very brief season during spring when crown crabs overrun the sand at Long Beach. They are so well camouflaged that you can swim right over masses of them without noticing. Here are two, back to back. They look like they’re preparing for a duel. Perhaps not best friends, then!
Combative crown crabs
Finally, here’s a pair of gorgeous double-sash butterflyfish at Long Beach under one of the wrecks. They are so tropical-looking I can hardly believe that they are found in the frigid water here! (Notice the barehead goby getting in on the action, to the left of the photo.)
Given the “each man for himself” mentality that pervades nature, it appeals to me to find a pair of similar marine creatures who appear to be friends (however naive that assumption may be!). Here are some of the highlights of the last few months. And don’t tell me that a golden retriever doesn’t count as a “marine creature”… When he’s this wet, he does!
Pooches at Long Beach
I’ve only seen button crabs once, so I don’t know if this is how they usually sit, but I find this pair very endearing! I love the way the grey dude is holding onto the brown one.
Embracing button crabs at Long Beach
Here are his and hers sea anemones, right next to each other at Long Beach. I don’t often see two as close together as this, and I thought the juxtaposition of colours was gorgeous.
His and hers anemones
We do sometimes see large groups of starfish feeding. These two, however, appear to be holding hands.
Friendly sea stars
I have struggled endlessly to photograph the orange-clubbed nudibranchs at Long Beach… My camera seems to want to blow out the white whenever I point it at one of them, but the other day, in decidedly inclement conditions, I found two feeding on their favourite meal of bryzoans on a piece of kelp. You can see the particles in the water around them – insidious backscatter – but I was quite happy with this shot. You should see how bad my previous efforts were!
Sometimes one comes across an unlikely pair of sea creatures in combat, conference or just comfortable coexistence. I love finding and photographing these moments. Here are some of my favourites, all taken in Cape Town (and most of them at Long Beach).
This klipfish has his ANGRY FACE on and is trying his best to look large and scary by raising his dorsal fin. The octopus is only mildly concerned. If I had to back anyone in a fight, it would be the octopus.
Stand-off between a klipfish and an octopus
At this time of year there are a lot of very small klipfish around, and they are generally quite skittish. I was very amused to see this one using a starfish as cover – his body is about the same length as one of the starfish’s legs!
Starfish and klipfish
Under the jetty in Simon’s Town Harbour we found some sea anemones so large that I’m convinced they’ve been there since 1950. On one of them a Cape rock crab was sitting in considerable comfort. The picture isn’t great – lots of surge under there – but you get the idea!
I often dive with Tony and his students. Often the students need a briefing in the water before we descend. Sometimes they struggle to get down. First time divers often need a minute or two to acclimatise to being underwater in the ocean. Whatever the reason, I spend a fair amount of time lying on the bottom in less than two metres of water, usually at Long Beach, waiting for the dive to begin. This is a pleasure that one enjoys only on shore dives, when one can swim down a gently sloping bottom enjoying the marine life as it changes with depth.
Tony examining a block on the pipeline at Long Beach
I’ve learned so much there. The sunlight is bright at that depth, and even though the gently sloping bottom just looks barren and sandy, close examination is always rewarded. On my way up the beach at the end of a dive, my eye has been attuned to notice the little creatures that I might miss initially, and it’s always a delight to be back in the sunlight again.
Three spot swimming crab in the shallows
It’s at this depth that we often see the three spot swimming crabs. Their shells are often washed up on the beach, with a mournful face design, but the crabs themselves are confident and aggressive. More than once I’ve been faced with one who looked as if he was fixing for a fight, and would gladly take me on. We also frequently see a large crab accompanied by a small one – apparently the female is large, and her special man friend is much smaller.
Fat plough shell burrowing into the sand
The shallows are where I see lots of gorgeous molluscs of various types. Fat plough shells have magnificent large feet, and it’s a pleasure to see them ploughing (yes!) through the sand. They bury themselves in the sand with only their siphon sticking out into the water – you have to look carefully to spot these – and thus hidden, they can wait and smell and taste when something interesting comes along.
Ribbed turrids at the restaurant
Sometimes we see great convocations of plough shells or ribbed turrids, gathering to munch on a tasty sea jelly corpse, or something else that a mollusc thinks is a good meal. They appear as if from nowhere, but actually they’ve been waiting beneath the sand for this opportunity to arise.
Helmet shell retreating
Helmet shells have smaller feet, but very attractive black and yellow striped feelers that they wave enthusiastically as they motor across the sand. As a child, I was incredibly excited to find one of their empty shells. As a grown up (mostly) scuba diver, I’m even more excited to spot one on the move.
Anemone in the shallow water
It’s in the shallow water that we also sometimes see bluefin gurnards. Here’s one camouflaged against the sand.
Bluefin gurnard hiding his blue fins
These fish look quite bland at first – much like barehead gobies – but when they spread their fins out, you see where their name comes from. Each round fin (looks like wings) has a brilliant blue spot on it. They have little barbels under their bodies that they appear to walk on, and they move INCREDIBLY fast. This photo was taken by me trying desperately to keep up!
Bluefin gurnard
Even on a night dive, the shallows can be an exciting place to be. Tony photographed these green surf mysids as they swarmed around our lights at the end of a night dive last year. When we got home and washed our kit, we found that quite a few of them had hitched a ride in our BCDs!
This is a French film by Jaques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud. There is a Disney version that is 20 minutes shorter, narrated by Pierce Brosnan, and aimed at young American audiences. Tony and I watched with the French narration and English subtitles.
The narration is sparse, nonsensical, and hard to follow. Fortunately it probably amounts to a page or two of text, and is scattered between large sequences of footage with only the sounds of the sea or a light musical accompaniment. Unlike the BBC Blue Planet documentary, none of the animals on screen are idenfied, nor is their behaviour explained.
Tony and I spent a lot of time wondering how some of the underwater sequences were filmed. State of the art cameras and filming techniques were used, and it shows.
There is incredible footage of marine iguanas, whales of multiple varieties, battling (or mating?) spider crabs, dancing dolphins, schools of gorgeous jellyfish, and a hilarious night sequence involving a grumpy mantis shrimp. I was amazed to see a huge whale swimming over a sandy bottom with only a foot or two to spare under his belly – imagine having such a big body, AND knowing where all of it is at one time! I love the manatee vacuuming the ocean floor, and the cuddling sea lions. There’s a breathtaking sequence showing a diver in scuba swimming along right next to a 4 metre great white shark. The clarity of the water hints that it wasn’t filmed here…
I loved the sequence towards the end of the film, showing various ships engaged in battling colossal waves. The power of the waves is very apparent. The narrative arc, such as it is, is very mixed and patchy, but the images are so compelling this hardly matters.
The film touches on the damage done by purse seine fishing, long-lining and shark finning – that footage in particular is horribly upsetting. From what I can understand from the credits (French) and my googling, this footage was staged and no animals were actually harmed, but this doesn’t detract from how awful it is.
You can order the DVD here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise on Amazon.com.
Long before I knew there was such a thing as scuba diving, I knew about shipwrecks. I grew up in Cape Town, and spent a lot of time in various rock pools, on the local beaches, on the Sea Point promenade, and sitting in the back seat of my parents’ Volkswagen Beetle as we whizzed around the peninsula. Cape Town is shipwreck paradise, and the most visible ones to me were the Antipolis, which sticks a tiny bit out of the water at Oudekraal, and the MV Romelia, which used to be an extremely prominent feature on the Llandudno rocks. I liked the Romelia because it was pink.
A photo of the Romelia, aground on the rocks, taken in 1989
(The picture above is from this website – worth a browse!)
Following Tony and Cecil through a crack
My parents told me the story of the Romelia and the Antipolis often (I liked saying the names, because they sounded romantic and mysterious) – in July 1977 my folks had been married for two years and were living in Cape Town when the tow rope connecting the two vessels to a Japanese tug snapped, and they ran aground independently on the western seaboard of the Cape Peninsula during a winter storm. The Romelia broke in half, and the bow sank, leaving the pretty pink (rusty) stern on the rocks. Later the stern also sank – a great disappointment to me, but no doubt a relief to the owners of the palaces in Llandudno!
Red bait zone and hottentot on the Romelia
I actually had no idea that you could dive on the Romelia, or where it had disappeared to, until the Sunday before Christmas. Our planned boat dive to Die Josie or Tafelberg Reef wasn’t looking like a good idea – reports were that the visibility was pretty poor, and the water was very dark. Grant suggested we go north, around the corner past Maori Bay to the MV Romelia.
Bernita checks out a wall
It’s a gorgeous 12 kilometre boat ride from Hout Bay slipway, past the BOS 400 in Maori Bay, past the nudist beach at Sandy Bay (strangely, everyone we could see was fully clothed!), and to Sunset Rocks on the southern end of Llandudno beach. Grant dropped the shot line quite close to the rocks, where an artificial cave is formed by the bow and some large rocks, with the anchors hanging from the ceiling.
Blue anemone on the Romelia
The visibility was mixed – there were clouds of fry (not sure which species of fish, but they were definitely babies) in the water at points, and the westerly wind of the day before had made things a bit soupy, but as we moved around the site there were patches of very decent visibility. I must confess that we’d been on the wreck for nearly ten minutes when I asked Tony where it was… He pointed at the (in retrospect) suspiciously smooth orange wall we had been hanging in front of since the start of the dive, and I realised that the ship has been so colonised by coraline algae and other sea life that most of it is virtually indistinguishable from the rocks around it.
Gas flame nudibranchs on the Romelia
There are amazing walls – each a different colour. One is mostly orange, another purple, and when you start ascending there are massive sea squirts above about six metres. These are all a rusty reddish brown colour. The rocks and the wreckage – some quite mangled, other sections totally hidden by sea creatures – are heavily encrusted with urchins, sea cucumbers, anemones, nudibranchs, and other invertebrate life. We saw large schools of hottentot in the red bait zone and against some of the walls.
Wall of purple
There are ample opportunities to swim through cracks in the rocks and between the wreck and the rocks, and this demanded good buoyancy control and some smart finning because there was a fair amount of surge. A particularly alluring gap was just too narrow for me, but every time I went close to try and take a photo through it the surge pushed me up perilously close to the wall, and I had to give up.
Another nudibranch on the Romelia
Most of the photos I took are of a macro nature because the visiblity didn’t warrant wide angle shots… You can see in the shots of the divers above that the water was very murky. But there’s also no opportunity really to get a panoramic view of anything because the site is more a series of passages and swim throughs than a giant ship lying on the ocean floor like the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks.
Tony and I are getting a little nephew soon (thanks to my sister and brother in law for doing the work), and I am making him a present for his bedroom wall. It’s a marine alphabet… Hopefully he’ll love the sea, as well as guitars and words (when his parents are done with him)!
Fish identification books for Cape Town and Southern Africa as a whole are filled with exotic species of crabs, many of which are supposed to be found in the Cape. Until recently, however I thought that the only kind of crab I would ever see in Cape Town would be the fairly common Cape rock crabs. They have similar colouring to West Coast rock lobster, and are often found in similar locations. I’ve had the good fortune of swimming through some kelp (which these crabs like) and having one land on my head and crawl over my face. Not knowing what it was, I got quite a fright!
Cape rock crab - unusual to see them on the sand
In the last few weeks, however, we have had a total crab bonanza, mainly at Long Beach. Part of the reason is that we have been swimming very carefully over the sand, north of the very well-travelled pipeline and smaller wrecks. There we have found some fascinating new friends.
Embracing button crabs in the sand
These two button crabs seem to be in a rather coercive relationship. I found them during the day, but apparently they are more commonly spotted at night. They look like futuristic robots, if you ask me!
Three spot swimming crab
Three spot swimming crabs have mournful faces on their shells, and modified back legs with paddles instead of feet. They are very feisty and will often stand their ground when encountered in the shallows. We often see a large female accompanied by her tiny male partner.
Feisty three spot swimming crab
There are also thousands of beautiful little crown crabs all over the sand at Long Beach. They are so well camouflaged that unless you keep still and look closely, most of the time you swim right over them.
Crown crabs on the sand
On the deeper reefs, where sea fans are found, you can spot sponge crabs clinging onto the fronds of the sea fans. We found this guy at Boat Rock in False Bay. Often all you can see is the little claws sticking out of the sponge, holding onto the reef.
Sponge crab on coral
There are many crab species that are only found in the Atlantic. As soon as Tony has a warmer wetsuit, we will be able to explore that side of the peninsula more often, and hopefully report back with pictures of sumo crabs and the like!
Of course, there are also the hermit crabs, the soft-bodied crabs that live in borrowed shells – but they are the subject of another post.
I have done one prior dive on the SS Maori, about a year ago. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, one I am not keen to repeat. The boat ride was harrowing – we took the narrow channel between Duiker Island and the mainland, and I had my eyes closed for most of it. I am not a good sailor, but Tony is, and even he was seeing his life flash before his eyes. Huge waves were coming from all directions and we later learned that the skipper had been so terrified negotiating the channel that he’d called the owner of the dive shop as soon as he’d dropped the divers into the water, and practically sobbed.
Klipfish on the Maori
We were actually intending to visit the BOS 400, but when we got there the surge through the wreck was incredibly strong and the entire superstructure was creaking ominously. A call was made to go to the SS Maori instead – it’s a couple of hundred metres from the crane and the wreck is scattered on the seabed rather than being still mostly intact. The dive itself was extremely stressful – maybe 3 metres visibility, temperatures so cold that I sucked my tank dry in about 20 minutes (ended up on Tony’s octo), strong surge on the bottom that made it impossible to control where one was going, and I honestly didn’t see anything that I could describe as a wreck.
Tami zoning in on something interesting
The experience we had diving the Maori on Reconcilation Day could not have been more different. Tami and I were finishing our Wreck Specialty course, Cecil was finishing his Open Water course, and Tony had a group of casual divers with him. The boat ride was a pleasure, apart from the smell (or rather, taste!) of the seals on Duiker Island as we sped past. The water was so blue that Grant could see the wreck below us while he dropped the shot line.
Iron water pipes on the Maori
The SS Maori ran aground in Maori Bay (named after it) in 1909 in thick fog. The ship lies perpendicular to the mainland, depth ranging from about 6 metres down to about 22 metres towards the centre of the bay. The ship was carrying a cargo of railway lines, cast iron pipes (visible in great stacks that are very tempting to try and swim through – common sense won out), explosives, and crockery. A fair amount of beautiful porcelain is still visible on the site, but apparently it’s been well worked and looted over the years.
Looking through a pipe
The visiblity on this dive was sufficient (20 metres or so) for us to be able to see far down the ship as we explored. Parts of the wreckage are very broken up, but there are large parts of the wreck that are relatively intact. We descended on the engine block, at the shallow end of the wreck, and into beautiful kelp forests that glistened green in the clear water. It was cold, very cold, but having something amazing to look at tends to distract one from the inconvenience of chilly fingers.
Rock lobsters on the Maori
As far as sea life goes, there’s a fair amount of kelp and other sea plants. Oscar found me a huge cuttlefish to photograph, just posing nicely on a rock, and there were some molluscs, the odd nudibranch, lots and lots of rock lobsters and crabs. We also saw a nice school of hottentot. Like the BOS 400, though, you visit this site first to look at the wreckage. Anything else you see is a bonus.
Cuttlefish on the Maori
I can see why the Maori is such a popular dive site – we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and Tami and I were heartbroken when we had to ascend, as our air reached 70 bar. It’s a very large site and several dives are required to appreciate its full scope. I plan to do those several dives, and then some!
Wreckage of the Maori
Dive date: 16 December 2010
Air temperature: 23 degrees
Water temperature: 4 degrees (that’s what my computer said!)
I spend one Sunday afternoon a month (the third Sunday – come and say hi – you can catch the shark feeding at 1500 while you’re there, and it might even coincide with my tea break!) at the Two Oceans Aquarium, volunteering at the Touch Pool or the microscope. It’s my job to interpret the exhibits to visitors, introducing them to the joys of marine life. My entire afternoon is documented on beenthere.tv because the camera is located just opposite the Touch Pool.
Working at the Touch Pool - sore back at the end of the day!
The Touch Pool is nothing special to look at. It’s a low concrete pool with a rim wide enough for little people to sit on. On any given day it contains icy cold water that is being constantly replaced by the aquarium’s filtration system, several sea anemones, a couple of hermit crabs, some whelks, lots of different kinds of seaweed and sea sponges, some starfish, several abalone shells, and a sea urchin or two.
Working at the Touch Pool
As a volunteer at the Touch Pool, I explain simple facts about the sea life to visitors. I also guide them regarding how to interact with the exhibit – no squeezing or pulling, do not take the anemones, crabs, urchins and starfish out of the water, and the like. We also tell the visitors where on their bodies to touch the creatures – most importantly, not to stick their fingers into the sea anemones’ mouths!
Looking for the hermit crab
The point of the Touch Pool is to touch. For really small children, it’s just about the different textures – toddlers love the slimy, knobbly and smooth seaweed and the rough sea sponges. Older children also love the seaweed too, but their chief interest is in the starfish and sea anemones. The experience of touching a starfish – gently, just under the surface of the water – is transformative.
The things that fascinate me about the Touch Pool are these:
Children will run towards the Touch Pool, past exhibits showing large, colourful, exotic fish, shouting “I want to touch the starfish”. This experience means more to many of them than the chance to see marine life that they’d NEVER see ordinarily, even large impressive creatures like sharks and rays.
Many adults have never interacted with marine life at all. It’s very special to help a grown up in their twenties or thirties feel the side of a sea anemone for the first time, or run their finger over the rough skin of a starfish. The adults are often more reluctant and fearful than the children.
Aquariums around the world have Touch Pool facilities. The animals are rotated in and out so that they have time to recover – it is unquestionably stressful for a starfish to be groped repeatedly by chubby little hands. But the curators have determined that the virtues of this kind of exhibit are outweighed by the risks to the animals.
As a diver, I am well aware of the debate surrounding touching of the sea creatures we encounter. I am of the view that interacting by touch with marine life is not totally taboo, and when I see the effect of giving this opportunity to small children and others – most if not all of them not scuba divers – I am convinced that there is a place for this kind of interaction in our experience of the sea.
