After completing my dive on Thursday, I drove across the state to visit with my Dad & his wife Sue, who have a place on the west coast in Estero (a suburb of Fort Myers).

We visited the Audobon Corscrew sanctuary, which has a 2.5 mile boardwalk through it.  Because of the boardwalk, and the fact that people can’t easily stray from it, I think the animals are particularly at ease here.  Of course, I didn’t have a good camera with me.  We saw all kinds of animals at close range.  It’s a birder’s paradise.

A brown anole, a very common sight in Florida.

A barred owl, roosting 10 feet from the walkway and completely at ease.

Another place we visited was the Lover’s key park.  It has great beaches, the fish are leaping out of the water, and there are osprey nests around.

My last day of diving this week was a Thursday with threatening weather out of the south.  I decided to dive the BHB (Blue Heron Bridge, see here and here) solo, and stay on the east side in 20 feet of water.  There weren’t too many people there.  I decided to work the east side under the low bridge, because of the wrecks underneath the bridge and all of the animals that can be found within.  I’d heard something about seahorses, and hoped to find some myself.

I entered the water about 20 minutes before slack high tide, which was 2:12 PM. Now that’s an easy schedule!  For some reason the board near the water’s edge had a high tide time of 2:30 posted; check some tables if you’re making plans.  The water temperature was 72, air temp about the same.  Using a 3mm suit and a hood, it was doable, but I was pushing it. Visibility was about 20″, but when the current changed at the end of my dive - about an hour and 15 minutes later - the vis dropped to less than 10 feet over less than five minutes.

A lot of the best photo opportunities can be found in the shallow sand leading up to the channel under the bridge, in only 8-12 feet of water, just where the slope rolls off into the 20″ region.  You are supposed to tow one of those damned surface markers here, and I did - but none of the 10 other divers that I saw were using one.  WTF?  It’s a pain to tow one because they can get tangled with fishing lines from people fishing off of the bridge, and it is one more thing to handle when you’ve got a camera.  Between handling the float, the camera, standard dive safety things, trying not to blunder into other divers in the murk and sometimes low vizibility, and remembering not to dive near the swimming beach - there’s a lot to keep in mind here.  Luckily, it’s so shallow, and so close to shore, that it doesn’t strike me as a particularly dangerous place to dive.

First, as always around BHB, the ubiquitous arrow crab.

Juvenile Gray Angelfish.  This animal will grow up to have a very different coloration; see the animal in the background in this image.

Flounders are miraculous creatures.  They are invisible until they move, and then they are graceful as they swim with a rippling motion.  This”eyed” flounder - funny name, given that they all have eyes - is almost undetectable, blending in with the sand and broken shells on the bottom.

Under the bridge it is like a spooky underworld cathedral.  The bridge’s columns march into obscure distance and indistinct blue light.  Although it is the Lake Worth lagoon - a stretch of sea water protected by a barrier island, and fed by fresh water too from a number of sources - it might as well be the river Styx.  The bodies of several small sailboats lie under the bridge, swathed in continual gloom and watched over by large schools of spadefish.  The schools can be so large that on occasion, as they flow around you, it can be disorienting, like flying through a flock of mirrors.  The presence of a large school appearing out of the misty darkness can be a little frightening, as it first seems to be the body of an enormous animal.  The bottom, particularly under the wrecks, teems with otherworldly life.  A five-foot southern stingray, looking like a fleshy stealth fighter, rippled from the nothingness beyond my line of sight and, upon seeing me, spun on its axis and disappeared into the haze, followed by a retinue of remoras.  Had it been a vision?  I knelt on the bottom and stared at the activity, awed and soaking in the spiritual moment.  Photography was superfluous.  Overhead, cars rumbled over the bridge, oblivious to the world below.

A bright plastic object - a fishing lure - distracted me.  Surrounded by a cloud of fish, it was being gigged up and down by its owner 25 feet overhead on the bridge sidewalk.  The fish were nibbling at the attached piece of squid, getting some meat but not taking the hook.  The fisherman had no idea what he was up against; a small army of animals with miniature tweezer mouths and lighting reaction times.  I was having trouble seeing it - and it was only 5 feet away; I was also shivering.  Time to go back!  Total dive time: 72 minutes, and only 1/2 of my air consumed.

Today I hooked up with a great guy I met on Scuba board.  Joe brought his friend (relative?) Lev and we all went in together.  Joe was kind enough to loan me a cylinder and some weights, the only things I don’t travel with.  Joe is clearly an old hand at the bridge and scuba, so was a natural dive leader.  For 75 minutes we dove the west side in water that never exceeded 13 feet and was a tolerable 74 degrees.  After all that time, I’d consumed only 1600 PSI of air (about half a tank).  That’s another wonderful thing about this site - endless bottom time, little danger.

The ocean has been disturbed by wind lately, so the vis was kind of bad.  You can see how many particles are in the water; it was only possible to take photos of things that were very close to the camera.  Some animals don’t like that!

I’ve written about BHB (as it’s known locally) once before because I dived there last year.  BHB is one of the easiest and most rewarding dive sites in this region.  It’s underneath a bridge on the east end of West Palm Beach.  There is a park - Phil Foster park - there, with bathrooms and showers.  Nothing could be simpler.  Dive up, park your car, gear up on a picnic table, and wade in.  There are only two gotchas:

1) Everyone else thinks that BB is great too.  There’s nothing like diving with, say, 200 of your fellow divers.

2) It’s only good for diving at slack high tide - the period just after high tide has finished coming in when the water i fairly still.  Otherwise, there is too much silt from the fresh water draining into the sea, and the visibility will be terrible.  Not to mention the current, which will carry you away.

To deal with these issues, we went on a Monday afternoon 20 minutes prior to slack high tide.

Here are the resulting photos:

This barred blenny is only about one inch long and is like a little fairy, because it has tiny little “antennas” (called cirri) and it pops in and out of hiding holes.  It’s adorable and fun to watch.  It will swivel its eyes paranoically at you and then instantly disappear, although the cirri will sometimes stick out of its hole.

This seaweed blenny reminds me of the dramatic gopher:

Red-tipped fireworm

Bearded fireworm.  I don’t know if they’re named “fireworms” because they are colored so brightly, or because they can sting (both are true).

Small yellow stingray, family Urolophidae

Crabs mating (blotched swimming cabs).  If disturbed, they will scuttle away together, locked in position.

One of the arrow crabs that are so abundant in this area.

A sharpnose puffer runs away; a gray angelfish is in the background.

I finally caught up with that sharpnose puffer, although it’s still pointed away from me…

A lantern bass;  it resembles a tiny grouper.

I kid you not, this juvenile wrasse is called a “slippery dick,” Halichoeres bivittatus.

Recently we had a snow & ice storm that coated everything with a beautiful gloss.  My cat, Sita, is always trying to escape to the great outdoors, so I thought “You want out?  Ok, you can have it.”  Holly took her outside and dropped her on the ice about 30 feet from the door.

Sita didn’t like it.

She rocketed back inside with no hesitation.  Hopefully, learning occurred.

This is Sita.  Sita watches TV.  She’ll become engrossed in something, a bus accident in this case, and you can see her head move back and forth as she follows the action.  Sita is the kind of cat that likes bus accidents.  In fact, I’m sure she’d really like gladiatorial combat to the death; she’d like to be one of the wild beasts that rips apart innocent Christians.

While working with the Canadian forces, flying on their CP-140 Auroras, I found that they feed their people really well.  Whatever food that is left over at the end of a flight is divided amongst the crew in a feeding frenzy.  Aurora crew will know what I’m talking about.

On my last flight I snagged a bag of really nice cantaloupe melon.  Not having a fridge in my room on this one night, I put it outside on the balcony, and went to bed looking forward to a morning of canteloupe consumption.

But it was not to be.  Someone else got to it before me… I heard a mysterious “thump” at the window, and saw this, seven stories below:

It landed on a rooftop, where I couldn’t get to it.  The damned gull wasn’t able to penetrate the bag, so the melon got wasted!

Just because I can, here are some pictures to serve as a reminder of gentler weather. Not that I mind snow, or even cold, but we only seem to get the bad part of winter nowdays (in the northeast corridor).  Grey, cold rainy days seemingly without end.

This grows in my back yard in the spring.

A young mockingbird mooning me in the twilight.

A titmouse, tiny and energetic.

My wife, who is mortally afraid of spiders, came to me a few years ago and announced that she’d found the largest spider she’d ever seen.  I hear this kind of thing all the time, and dutifully trudged off to relocate the animal, expecting a tiny blond spider.  But this time she was right (see her account of the story here).  On the kitchen floor I found a spider the size of a 50-cent piece.  A spider that could move like the wind. The kind of animal that winds up running over the back of your hand while you’re trying to capture it, and you can feel its weight.

Of course, I captured it and spent hours photographing it.  Since I’ve been posting bugs lately, I had to post about it.  Don’t forget to click to make it bigger…

The good folks at www.whatsthatbug.com ID’d it as a “rabid” or “rapid” wolf spider (both apt names).  Wolf spiders can bite people, but usually don’t.  I didn’t take too many chances.  If you look at this image below, you can see the giant mandibles gleaming dully through the “hairs” on its mandibles.  They look like iron meat hooks.

While working with it and looking at it through my magnifying stack of lenses, I noticed for the first time - but not the last while looking at spiders - that it worked its jaws constantly and that it had what appeared to be a tongue, a little pink catlike one, and that the interior of its mouth was wet.  I didn’t realize that spiders had mouths that could open or had saliva, and maybe I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but it sure looked like a little pink mouth with a tongue in it - one that worked maniacally as its huge mandibles rubbed against each other in anticipation of plunging them into the next victim.  Definitely creepy.  It was like a corny villain rubbing his hands together in anticipation of an evil deed.  I could see it looking at me with its many eyes and reacting to my movements.  It didn’t like the flash, but it got used to it.

Spider eyes, by the way, are very different than insect eyes.  For one, spiders do not have compound eyes.  Their eyes are more like our own, or at least, some of their eyes are like ours.  The various sets of eyes are specialized for different purposes - some for use in sensing prey at a distance, some for manipulating prey while feeding, etc.  Kind of like the little video cameras that can be installed on RVs or SUVs for backing up.

Another cool thing about spiders is how they have little cat feet, if you look closely.  When relaxed, they test the surface much like my cat does when she’s walking on something unstable.

Some people keep these as pets. Check out this disturbing image:

Image by Brett Tyler

Here is a shot to show you how big this thing was, and also another fact: spider feces looks like bird crap.

More images of this guy can be found here.  I didn’t name it; suggestions, anyone?

And no, I didn’t keep the profoundly creepy thing.  It lives in the back yard now.

I’ve been on a bug streak lately.

In the last post I mentioned ocelli, because they were so prominent in the image of the mantis.  Here is another bug - a cicada - showing prominent ocelli, or accessory eyes.  You can see them on the ‘forehead” in between the prominent red compound eyes.  This individual has recently emerged from its nymph stage (leaving the characteristic shell, not shown).  I had this one in a jar and watched the entire sequence unfold.  You can see that its wings have not completely “inflated” yet.

As a nymph, the cicada had no ocelli.  This is because the nymphs don’t have wings; the ocelli function mainly as flying aids. I took this shot in 2004 during the emergence of brood X.

Those of you who received my yearly letter may remember this one. It was a large mantid that somehow ended up in my house. It was a difficult and uncooperative subject, refusing to stay still or upright. I had to trap it in a container for the shoot.

It was the most engaged insect subject I’ve had the pleasure to shoot; she watched everything and seemed constantly to be on the verge of violence. One of the things I like about photographing insects is that you are forced to meditate upon your subjects; you spend great amounts of time with them and notice things about them that normally pass under your field of vision. When you see an insect carefully clean itself, and realize that insects are capable of gentleness, it has to make you think that everything you knew about them was bigoted nonsense that must be discarded. I don’t think they are “smart” in the intellectual sense, nor do I have illusions about their brutality - positive or negative.  They are living things and their dramas are as large as ours; larger than the average person’s maybe.

If you click to make this larger, you’ll see the three pseudo-eyes, called ocelli, between the antennae. Did you know that most insects have ocelli? I didn’t, until I began looking.  I’ll try to find some other pictures I’ve taken of insects with ocelli.