Hazardous Marine Life

Last week we talked about hazardous marine life and here is the accompanying chalk board drawing.

I've got a shark, a Portuguese man of war, an eel, urchin, blue ringed octopus, lion fish, fire coral, and a cone snail.  Today we are talking SCUBA cylinders, but no drawing. Long, busy weekend with little sleep equals zero creative energy...

Scientific Diver Qualification Course!

Yesterday, the scientific dive course began. This is the second year that I will be assisting Jason in teaching the course.  It is a three week intensive couse that is 10 hours a day for the students and more like 12-14 for Jason and I.  The course is required for students who will need to use diving for the research while they are at UH.  

The first few days we are in the classroom and this has afforded me the opportunity to use my favorite artistic medium--the chalkboard! More posts to come...

Things I shouldn't be doing

Although I should be working diligently on describing octopus mating behavior, I have also been working on making a rubber stamp. Here is the outcome of my labor. 

A fun project for a night on boats... I've got quite a bit more rubber left and more creative juices pumping. I'll post subsequent projects (if there are any).

Jeff Corwin comes to Coconut Island!

Last week,  Jeff Corwin and his team came to Coconut Island to film Dr. Carl Meyer and his shark research. They needed someone to drive a whaler up close to the other boat so that Travis (the guy on camera 2) could get good footage of the sharks.  I also had the producer, Carolina, and the sound guy, Tyler, on the boat. Unfortunately, they didn't fare so well in the open ocean and both got sick.  Usually in those situations I feel like I'll get sick too, but thankfully I didn't.  

It was pretty exciting to meet Jeff Corwin since he basically does what I want to do--travel the world and talk about animals.  Who wouldn't want to do that?!  The day I went out with the film crew, we saw a small tiger shark, but none of the six-gills we went out to catch.  The next day, however, they caught a whole bunch! Of course I missed it :( But, I'm glad they got the footage they wanted of the research happening in the Holland Lab.

Carl Meyer and an associate in Japan are tagging these sharks with devices that have accelerometers (to find out how fast the sharks move), temperature and depth gauges (pretty self explanatory) and video cameras! So, when the sharks go off and do their sharky stuff, we get to see what they are up to. It's pretty neat--I saw some of the video and it's like you are riding on the back of a shark!  It turns out that they often meet up with other shark pals and so there is great footage of them all together, even separate species mingling in the same area.

Last week a friend of mine brought her family out for a tour of Coconut Island. After the all of the old favorites (the octopuses, sharks, touch tank) we headed to the beach house where we saw the weirdest fish I've ever seen! Mia (a girl on the tour) spotted something hugging the sandy substrate down below us and asked what kind of fish it was. At first I thought "Oh, that's a rock fish or something," but then I realized its bizarre pectoral fins dragging along beside it.  "What the hell is that? It looks like it is trying to walk on them." Then, suddenly, the pectoral fins spread out into the most magnificent wings! What?!!  It's a bird fish! I had to look it up on my phone so I googled "fish with wings."  Turns out it is an Oriental Flying Gurnard.  This fish is terribly confused.  It WALKS on its fins along the sea floor, acting like it's all "Oh, I can walk, see? Don't be fooled by my fishiness. And wait, you wanna see my freaky wings? BAM! Now I'm a freakin' bird! Hold on a sec, I gotta make some GRUNTING froggy noises to chat with my other messed up fish friends." What?! Make up your mind, fish!  Are you a fish? A bird? A frog? 

Anyway, I got super excited (as you might be able to tell from this post) and ran around Coconut telling people about this strange hybrid fish and it turns out, everyone already knew about it... So, in case you are like me and have apparently been living in sweet ignorance of this monster fish, now you know.  Here is a pic (not mine, I'm not that talented a photographer):

I just had one of those rare "I'm an IDIOT!" moments that actually resulted in good news! Not to say that it is rare that I am an idiot, but rather that it would be a good thing.  I went to collect eggs from a female yesterday and discovered that they had all hatched! I was left with sad strings of empty, lifeless, withered egg sacs (except of course for the infrequent spattering of a mutant octopus babies that had developed incorrectly and never made it out of the egg).  I did what I could, collected the strands and tried to collect as many free swimming paralarvae possible.  The free swimming paralarvae are TINY and I have to put the water though a sieve and painstakingly remove each one with tweezers.  And if that weren't enough, I always end up with weird contaminants from the water in my test tube and that's no good for genetics.  But, on to the good news!  Tonight while I was trudging through data entry, I had a lightbulb moment where I suddenly though, "Wait, was that the wrong female!? The female whose beautiful voluptuous eggs I collected a few days ago?" I quickly put on my boots (without socks which apparently makes them nearly impossible to take off) and ran though the rain down to the tanks.  I took out the other female's tank (both are pink, which may have caused the confusion) and there they were--perfect, bulging, swollen pearls of octopus babies ripe for the picking. I thought, "Yay! I am an idiot!" and quickly got to work harvesting babies for my genetics experiments.

On another note, the Pelagic Lab caught a deep sea octopus the other day! It was alive when they brought it back and so they let me keep it with my others to see if it would survive and also to figure out what species it was.  Sadly, she only lasted three days as it refused to eat anything I put in there. Not live crabs I caught with my own bare hands, not succulent raw shrimp, nothing.  However, I did get some great pictures.  I am pretty sure it is Graneledone pacifica.  What do you think?  It's definitely less red, but has the same bumpy mantle, no ink sac, and a gigantic head. It lost color as the days went by, so it may have become more orange even as it was coming up from the depths.  It came up on their anchor from about 700ft down! But it also kind of looks like Bathypolypus arcticus  but those guys usually live in the Atlantic ocean...

Here's the Graneledone pacifica

Here is Bathypolypus arcticus

And here's the little girl the Pelagic Lab found (they took to calling her Octopus Prime)

Of course, I got a genetics sample so maybe we can see if it's really what I think it is or something new!