The Five-Foot Jellyfish, Revisited

One of the earliest posts on this blog was written four years ago almost to the week, and on it I shared some photos of a phenomenon I hadn’t been able to find an answer for. This was back when I was living in Madang, on PNG’s north coast, and getting onto- and under- the water was our way of coping with the days. It was an odd tube-like structure, bright purple, about six inches in diameter and almost as long as a grown man. It was made up of thousands of tiny little beads, floating just below the surface of the waves, and was clearly organic in nature. The photos I took of it at the time are here:

Since then, the post has remained one of my more active pages, receiving around 3,000 hits and a number of comments and suggestions from around the globe as to what this thing might be, as well as quite a few people reporting seeing a similar phenomenon. Another reader (Andrew) posted a link to more photos of an object from the Philippines, clearly the same thing.

Finally, in June this year (while I was largely absent from my blog), another reader, Vincent C, said he had seen one of these in the waters off Taiwan. He did some research and, after his initial post, responded with a second comment identifying the ‘thing’ as a “floating egg mass” from the Diamondback Squid, Thysanoteuthis Rhombus, together with a link to a stock photo, which looks more or less identical.

So there you have it, folks: The random mass of floating purple jelly beads is apparently the egg mass of the Diamondback Squid. Mystery solved. A huge Wanderlust shout-out to Vincent C. for figuring out the correct answer, and whose URLs are unfortunately coming back as invalid at this point in time. I am genuinely happy to finally know what it was we stumbled upon all those years ago in Madang Harbour.

I hope you can all sleep a little better at night now.

Post Script: If you’re feeling particularly geeky, you can read some more info on T. Rhombus here. The egg mass described there contained around 180,000 individual eggs, and the hatching took an average of about 57 hours- a pretty rapid development from the sound of things! The water temperature described- 28-29 degrees Centigrade- was pretty much exactly what we had in Madang Harbour.

Close Enclownter

After an eighteen-month hiatus, I finally got back into the water in Fiji.  Or not so much into it, but under it.  And I got to take my camera (the Powershot G9, not, sadly, the 5D) swimming too.

The snorkelling along the beach was fantastic- probably the most beautiful beachside reef I’ve ever had the opportunity to explore (more on that presently).  However I did also get the chance to do a little diving as well.  A refresher dip, just so I could recall how to submerge myself without panicking/drowning/getting decompression illness.  Then a shark dive (way to ease yourself back into the hobby), replete with Grey, White-Tip and Black-Tip Reefers, Grey Nurses, and a couple of pretty bulky Lemon Sharks as well.  Awesome fun- but sadly, in my haste (and a tickle of nervousness as well) I accidentally left the camera on the boat.

I also did a dive with my fiancee.  It was her first, an explorer dive, which she very bravely accomplished with the instructor with just 15 minutes’ worth of briefing- something I never would have done.  But I managed to remember my camera this time, and took it along to document the fun, and explore the reef at the same time.

As I’ve mentioned before, anemonefish are great subjects, because unlike most fish, which scurry away the moment you home in on them like a cycloptic predator, anemonefish tend to stay put.  You know where to find them (check out your nearest anemone), and not only do they not swim away, they often charge at you, all teeth and tiny bouts of indignance.

This little reel is a set of six colourful shots I managed to snatch of one pair of such little critters.  The combination of bright colours, the exotic location, and the semi-translucent tentacles of the anemone itself, all make for fun viewing.  I hope you enjoy.

For the record, I suspect that the little fishies showcased here are all Cinnamon or Fire Anemonefish (Amphiprion Melanopus)- a little different from the Anemone Clownfish of Nemo fame which most people are familiar with.  I have no idea what the anemones are (there are at least two species shown here).

More Fiji shots- above and below water- to come.

Note: Photo at top taken snorkelling in Blue Lagoon; photos at bottom taken diving at depth ~10m on Blue Lagoon Reef.

Frozen in a Moment

I went with friends A and M to the waterpark the other day.  We had a glorious sunny day (with a chilly wind), and M in particular was more excited than I have ever seen a child get- quite literally quivering with excitement at the sight of the coloured slides and water-drenched playgrounds, prancing like a pony on the spot while she waited for the sluggish adults with her to keep up (or not).  She had a great time.

Water makes for an awesome photography subject at almost any time- its textures, the way it changes, the way it plays with the light…  There’s a myriad of different combinations, each of them unique.

In a flash of brilliant foresight I took the WP DC-21 dive case for my Powershot G9 so that I had a splashproof camera.  In the case I don’t get as much control over shutter-speed and aperture, so I set it on Program, had it underexpose the shots slightly by default, and let the camera chose its settings.  In the bright sunlight, the camera compensated by choosing a fast shutter-speed.

I spent a bit of time at the bottom of some of the slides catching M and A as they hit the splash-tray at the bottom.  And splash they did.  Even the process of taking the photos was fun, as spraying water slooshed over the camera lens- and my nasal passages to boot.

With the fast shutter-speed, the camera froze the sprays in beautiful moments of physical expression.  Strings of loosely-associated water-droplets hanging in space, great shimmering sheets of translucent fluid frozen like ice in a moment of time, and the beautiful fluid contours that to the naked eye break apart quicker than we can take them in, but captured by light sensors, remain like some crystaline architecture.

These shots are some of my favourites- made more fun by the bright colours of the playground themselves.  I’m especially fond of this last shot and the way M’s face is (by pure chance) framed by the tube of hurtling water.

Note: Click the photos to see more detail.

How to freeze splashes with the camera:

It really comes down to Fast Shutter Speed.  The faster the shutter speed, the sharper the droplets of water will appear (i.e. the less distance they will be able to move during the time the shutter is open).  Speeds around and beyond 1/1000th of a second will give best results.  Increasing the shutter speed obviously decreases the amount of light getting into the camera (a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second lets in half the light photons of 1/500th of a second- obviously) so you need to be able to compensate for this.  Shooting on a sunny day will allow faster shutter speeds (but you can’t always control this).  Increasing your aperture (to numbers like f/2.8) will allow more light in so you can balance the faster shutter-speed.  Likewise increasing your ISO (from, say, 100 to 400, which allows the image to expose 4 times quicker) also has the same effect.

Note the downsides.  Shooting on a sunny day can lead to high-contrast photos (bad for portraits, as a rule) and if you shoot into the sun, expect backlighting effects (like the black-and-white, above), lens-flare, overexposure or a loss of colour.  Increasing the aperture reduces the depth-of-field (the amount of the image front-t0-back which is kept in focus)- when shooting close to the subject you’ll find that as little as a few inches of the photo only are sharp, while the rest falls quickly out of focus- great artistic effect if you nail it right (or get lucky- see the last shot).  Increasing ISO adds ‘noise’ or ‘grain’ to a photo (depending on how good the sensor is) so shots may appear of a lower quality.

If you’re not comfortable managing your camera’s settings on fully manual (M) mode, and the automatic (A) mode isn’t giving you the results you want, set the camera to the time-value (Tv) mode, which lets you directly control shutter-speed while automatically compensating the other exposure values to give you the parameters you want.

Note that to get the right moment of splash and the best sprays, you need to get the timing right.  Pre-focusing the camera on the point of impact is your best bet.  Pre-focused, most SLR cameras are instantaneous so it comes down to your reflexes.  If you’ve got a point-and-shoot or compact camera, these have varying delays (even pre-focused) so you’ll need to be familiar with these.  Alternatively you can set the camera to multiple-exposure mode and hold down the fire button.  A good camera can take several frames per second (depending on the motor/drive and the format of the exposure (RAW, hi-rez JPEG, lo-rez JPEG) and can capture several shots of action to give you a good chance of getting the shot.  Most point-and-shoots have slower drives and often have long delays between frames so you could miss the fun.

Of course, you can just point, shoot and hope for the best.  That works too.

Rocking Planet Rock

I can safely say I have never seen quite such a plethora of fish than that which I saw at Planet Rock on Saturday.  I couldn’t begin to number them.  In this small sliver of a shot you can see- what- three hundred?  Five hundred?  I haven’t even tried counting.  And there was a solid three-dimensional wall of them, like a gigantic underwater swimming-pool jammed full.  An immense living morass of sleek flitting fish.  My only regret for the morning’s exploits was that a smudge in the middle of my underwater case on the inside of the glass ruined most of my shots.  You’ll have to bear with me on the few that I’ll share here.

Here you can see Jan doing his thang.  A graceful and experienced diver, Jan’s pretty much lost track of how many dives he’s done, but it’s over 2,000.  Most of them here in Madang Harbour.  He’s also a darn good underwater photographer and a true artist with Photoshop.  When he puts his stuff up on RedBubble I’m sure buying some.  Here’s an older shot of him cruising along the bottom of Madang Harbour, sans smudge and with a bit more light.

A pair of barracuda were gliding in a lazy circle like a pair of cruise missiles looking for something to bomb.  They’re cool fish.  Very benign to be close to, but with those maws they look like mean buggers.  Like sharks they’re so streamlined and graceful.  We had a shark out there on Planet Rock, too, but I didn’t get a photo.  We only caught distant glimpses of him up near the surface, a big Grey Reefer, perhaps eight feet long, just that unmistakable silhouette up against the light.  It’s a wonderfully eerie and humbling experience being close those ancient predators.

Overall, Planet Rock has to be one of my favourite dive sites, and I’m just sorry I wasn’t able to get a better range of photos out of my time there.  I’d say next time, but sadly as my time in PNG draws to a close, that next time may be a very long way off…

Something Lionfishy

This beautiful Lionfish (Scorpionfish; Firefish; Turkeyfish) was floating in the surge beneath Hole in the Wall on Sunday.  I really adore these guys- such a wonderful display of feathery creativity.  I will sorely miss being able to get close to such wonderful creatures.

Biodiversity

One of the great attractions of diving is the abundance of life you get to witness. It’s true what they tell you in the handbooks- a half-hour dive on the reef will let you see more diverse flora and fauna than ten times as long walking through a forest or a field. Pick the right spots, and life is teeming around you, always moving, always interesting, always colourful. It’s a never-ending procession of the creativity of the Creator, and I get high off it.

Since getting into diving, I’ve discovered that one of the coolest things about being underwater is that a lot of the stuff that lives down there is downright weird. I’ve posted a few nudibranch shots, for example. When I say the word ‘slug’, you’re going to think of some ugly grey slimey thing that oozes on your lettuce head. But these marine versions are so phenomenally diverse, with bizarre and seemingly extraneous appendages and blatantly unnecessary colours, they could have stepped right out of a Gaultier costume extravaganza.

Take Christmas Tree Worms. These guys are awesome. I had no idea what they were at first. They look like little plastic toys, sticking out of holes in rocks or coral heads. Their bizarre spirals cluster like superfluous decorations, a teeny tiny forest, so for a while I wasn’t sure if they were plant, animal or mineral. They look just like a soft coral growth, but when you get too close, they suck back into their holes, curling up and vanishing in the blink of an eye- distinctly un-plant-like behaviour. Again what strikes me each time I see them is the wonderful colours. I’ve only got this one shot of a blue one, but I’m determined to see if I can’t collect a full set of colours.

These next shot I don’t have a lot of intelligent things to say about. I don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s just a random piece of reef scenery. Most likely coral. I just love that it looks like nothing else you’d find on the earth’s surface- it could almost be some alien flora. And this is a tiny six-inch fraction of a reef. Imagine if you could catalogue everything living and growing on Madang’s ten miles of living barrier.

This giant spiny Sea Slug was one of the highlights of Sunday’s dive. I’ve no idea what species it is, but it was huge- about a foot long, and as fat around as a clenched fist. You could headline it in a Ridley Scott feature and nobody would have any problem believing it was some extra-terrestrial parasite. The outrageous colours and bizzare protrusions make it like a giant step-brother to the fragile little nudibranchs, a behemoth among molluscs. Enjoy it in all its grotesque, spiny glory.

This little Hawkfish I shot in murky light near Tab Island last weekend. I really loved how his patterns and body-makeup make him blend perfectly into the spiny coral.

And on the subject of patterns, neither of these shots are as crisp as I would have liked, but both were taken in suboptimal optical conditions (say that three times very quickly with a marshmallow in your mouth). I hope to get a better chance at catching them again in the future. The first is, I think, some species of Angelfish. I’m not entirely sure. I found it flitting around coral off Barracuda Point on Saturday, during a dive that was full of exciting wildlife, but low on photographic opportunities. This one moved just a little too much for me to get a sharp shot, but even so I think you can appreciate the wonderful colouring and patterns.

The second photograph is of a juvenile Emporer Angelfish. The Emporer Angelfish is a relatively common sight along the reefs here, but apparently the juvenile version is a little less prolific. The two look nothing alike- in fact if you didn’t know it, you’d think it was a completely different species of fish. I will try and get a photo of an adult for comparison. But this juvie’s rings and swirls and splotches of white and blue are just delightful- truly one of the prettiest fish I’ve seen. This one was lurking around the wreck of a Cessna just off Tab Island.

From a little juvenile a few centimetres long, to a great walloping lump of fish more than thirty metres down, this guy is some species of Rock Cod, I think. He was the second of these I found lurking under a coral growth in just a couple of minutes. I spotted his cousin a little earlier while loitering at forty metres, but as I was about to line up a shot I noticed Jan had moved on and was around the next spur, and I didn’t fancy being left alone. Ascending, and this one made his presence known. At over half a metre long, I bet you could get quite a few steaks out of him.

And from the plain and almost ugly to the extravagantly beautiful. This one is a reefside classic, alternately known as a Firefish, Lionfish, Scorpionfish, or even Turkeyfish. I think that the common name for this species is the Red Firefish, and it belongs to the order Scorpionidae, so Scorpionfish works as well, but with a big mane like this you can see why it gets the Lionfish moniker. This is with out a doubt one of my favourite fish in the sea. It is posessed of a delicate beauty, with that fan of long fragile trendrils that float like so much extraneous crepe-paper. The stripes are full of drama, a veritable siren screaming ‘do not touch’: the Firefish gets its name from the row of poison-tipped spines protruding from its dorsal fin. And like the sub-adult Sweetlips, its locomotive habits make it a joy to photograph. The Lionfish hangs motionless in the water, looking deceptively like a piece of discarded seaweed, drifting with the surges, before pouncing on smaller unsuspecting fish. I got my lens to within six inches of this young one- always cognisant of the dorsal spines- and it never really gave me a second look.

Just a teeny tiny sampling of the vast and rich diversity life has to offer beneath the waves. When you think about the size of the oceans, it’s enough to blow your mind…

Daylight

Looking up from beneath.  Water, air, fire.  Madang, PNG, near the B-25 Bomber wreck.

This Wreck is the Bomb-er

I won’t say that it’s one of my favourite dive sites, because I pretty much love them all. It is however a fascinating blend of history and nature that teases the imagination, above and below the water.

The American B-25 sits in shallow waters just off Wongat Island. She was shot down during the Second World War by the Japanese, when they held northern Papua New Guinea and had one of their major bases just a few miles down the road. The story of her six crew is not a happy one. Although just one crewman died in the crash itself, the other five were captured and, in retaliation for recent bombing raids carried out by the Americans, executed. The aircraft sits in almost perfect condition as a lasting, living memorial beneath the waters.

It’s only even been murky when I’ve dived the B-25, so I have yet to get a good shot of the wreck as it lies. It’s at a considerable angle, with one wingtip at about twelve metres’ depth, the other down around twenty-eight. The wings and tail-plane are still intact, and even remnants of the undercarriage can be spotted. The deeper right wing has the propellor fixed to the engine, bent back by the crash-landing but still recognizable where it sticks vertically out of the sand.

One of the favourite features of the aircraft are undoubtedly its machine-guns, still mounted in the wreck. There are four guns protruding from the nose housing, two inset in each wing, a tail gun, and the B-25’s distinctive gun-turret mounted atop the fuselage towards the rear of the aircraft.

Divers can drop into the roofless cockpit and sit in the pilot’s seat, the steering-wheel still mounted in the control board. This is my boss. I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to have that second stage between his teeth…

Over time, as with everything discarded in the sea, nature has claimed the craft, which has now become a naturalised reef. A giant barrel-sponge sits on the up-slope wingtip, a distinctive marker during the descent and now growing so big that there are concerns it could snap the wing off altogether. Coral and sponges and algaes and all sorts of other undersea flora have colonized the surfaces. Fish spawn in the hundreds inside the relative safety provided by the abandoned fuselage. Others graze the vegetation under the wings and around the tail mount.

There are regulars here. A White Leaf Scorpionfish lives among thorny corals at the back of the left-hand wing, elusive and hard to spot even on a clear day. The bottom shot shows him in natural light rather than flash-lit, and you can see why he’s not that easy to find. He’s about four inches long. Check out that beautiful eye.

I’ve seen these guys a couple of times when I’ve been down there. I can never tell whether they’re False Moorish Idols, Three-Stripe Angelfish, or some other form of Bannerfish, all of which look pretty similar. They are beautiful- though a tad skittish and hard to get close to, hence the murky shot.

Ribbon eels live in the sand beneath the downslope wing and are predictably easy to find, worming their way half out of their holes like Cobras swaying to a snake-charmer’s pipe.

Yesterday, there was some giant lobster living under the wing. I haven’t seen him before, I just noticed his antennae and the front knuckles of his long spindly legs dancing out from underneath the wing. I didn’t get too close. He must have been nearly a metre in size, when all the protrusions and probiscuses were taken into account. He was a little shy and slipped back into the silt before I could get a photo.

The other resident we came across yesterday was the polar opposite, both in terms of size and body complexity. This little nudibranch was spotted by Bec, who managed to prove to me (as has been proved to me time and again) that I suck at finding nudibranchs. I do, however, love a bit of nudi action when I can get it.

My favourite family of Anemonefish lives on the right wing of the bomber. They’re just back a little ways from the cockpit in a big writhing blob of anemone, predictable and easy to find. Unlike Lionfish or Sweetlips, the Anemonefish tend to be a little camera-shy, and as soon as you point the thing at them, they’re dancing like they’ve got ants in their pectorals. In fact they’re some of the most highly territorial little fish in the sea, and even though relative to them I am the size of an Enterprise-class aircraft carrier, they still try and see me off from their patch. As a result, getting an in-focus photo of one is no mean feat. I resort to the age-old practice of firing off as many pictures as I can take and hoping that by sheer dumb luck, at least one will turn out right.

It works occasionally.

The shot below shows the difference between shooting flash and shooting natural light (this one using natural light).

After spending half an hour on the wreck, we come back up for a safety-stop on the chain holding the marker bouy.

It’s hard to avoid celebrating the diversity of life, even on something as incongruous as a war wreck. I find the triumph of creation as one of the great beautiful mysteries of this world. Left to itself, we find the force of life manifesting in almost every circumstance, even one where death previously triumphed. As if the natural world is telling us with one loud voice, everything can be redeemed.

Sweet Lips, Dude

My knowledge of Sweetlips is pretty limited. I first heard of the fish as a species hand-feeding chunks of bread to them from the end of a reefside jetty in Vanuatu about six months ago. Big squat things without fancy colour or graceful shape, they’re still somehow appealing in their brute ugliness, like many fish I paddle across. Apparently they taste great, though I’ve never (to my knowledge) eaten one.

These here are sub-adult Silver Sweetlips- given away by the array of yellow spots over their body. They’re not pretty. They’re not streamlined. As far as I know they’re not possessing of any uncommon intelligence. What makes them special for the photographer, however, is that they’re about as dynamic as cows. They sit there on sandy bottoms- in this case in rock crevices about twenty metres down the reef wall- and hang there an inch off the ground. They don’t really move much, and they don’t appear to be particularly bothered by the presence of divers. If you’re careful, you can get to within a few inches of them, and they might give a lazy flick of the tail and drift just out of reach, but so long as you don’t charge in amongst them, that’s about as much movement as you’re likely to see.

So I had some fun lining up a few shots with them. Here, one Sweetlips shows off the distinctive pattern of yellow spots that sadly fade with time.  You can see the distinctive fat pout that presumable gives the fish its common name.

Firing flash catches some of the silvery hues off the fish’s flank. While I like using natural light where possible to photograph underwater, conditions often make this challenging. If the dive is deep or the sun is behind cloud, not only does this adversely affect shutter-speeds, but you lose the natural colours of the subject, and everything cools down to shades of blue. Firing a flash is like putting a burst of sunshine on a fish, and if you’re subtle about it, you can make it as bright and colourful as it would be at the surface.

Listen to me. I make it sound like I actually know what I’m doing here.

This Sweetlips below clearly had enough of my photographic intrusions and tried to make a run for it. Happily it still moved slowly enough that I could keep it lined up in the frame. Its more colourful piscine cohabitants like the Moorish Idol and the Anemone Clownfish (forthcoming) are rarely so accomodating.

As well as making moves on loitering Sweetlips, we came across a whole bunch of other life down in Sek Passage yesterday. In fact, there were shoals and shoals of the stuff above us near the reef crown.

I only had a split second to fire off a shot at this torpedo-like Barracuda as it streaked past me, so it’s not as sharp as I would have liked. Mind you, his teeth certainly are.

This little fella I have no clue about. All I can say is he was slow enough for me to get a bead on him before he scuttled off. If anyone knows his name, drop me a line. I’m always curious.

My final offering from Sek Passage is somewhat less natural than the rest of my portfolio. This is a diver’s weight, the sort we hang from our belts to help us stay underwater rather than cork to the surface. I spotted it almost directly beneath where we’d anchored the boat at the mouth of the passage. To give you an idea of scale, it’s about three inches long. I don’t know how long it’s been down there, presumably dropped by some slip of wet fingers and lost to the deep. It was about seven metres down. It’s an anthropic intrusion into an otherwise natural environment, but I really like how it’s been colonized by the reef anyway. With luck, in another few years, you won’t even be able to see it at all.

Clam-tastic

I’ve heard of giant clams. I’ve even seen the odd one here and there. One’s been turned into a lampshade at the Coastwatchers Hotel here in Madang. An eerie orange glow shines between the ridged teeth of its two-foot clamp. Once or twice I’ve come across them underwater. Usually they’re closed, a thin line of dark showing between the partitioned slabs of shell where the organism itself lurks. This one here shows where one such mollusc has departed its home on the Great Barrier Reef, whether it’s headed for an upsized plot somewhere in the aquatic suburbs, or has shuffled off this mortal shell altogether.

But when they’re alive, inside they’re so colourful! I had never realised until last week just how psychadelically vibrant they are. Pulsing with colour, the big one below was pushing three feet long, tentatively easing open and shut as my perceived threat waxed and waned. I was in awe of the electric blue streaks that are dashed over its innards and the rime of pulsating green around the border of the shell. The inset shows a close-up of another specimen, this one allowing me to get a little nearer and even catch a flash of its gullet, winding down into the guts of the shellfish. Not something you’d want to see as a small fish. I think it’s amazing how the plainest, most ordinary-looking creatures from the outside can have the most pointlessly outrageous decorations on the inside.