Biology

During a dive at the house reef in Aquaba I see a blue fish. The color is so striking; I know at once it is a false stonefish (Scorpaenopsis diabolus).
I always find it strange, the tropical fish have these notable colors, there is nobody to see it. This colorful Scorpio stays motionless, he knows he is poisonous, that gives him confidence. I am fully aware of that, but I am not scarred either. I want to get closer and closer, I need to take a picture of his eye.

For divers in tropical waters feather stars are a common sight. Almost all around the world feather stars bring colour to the under water environment. Despite its nice colours divers normaly do not pay too much attention to these animals. We are more likely to pay attention to all the fish around us; search for the bog animals and leave the feather stars on its own. We think of it as less interesting animals. But this means that we will miss a number of surprising meetings.

We are in the Bahamas and we are going to dive with sharks, the ordinary Caribbean Reef shark (Carcharhinas perezi). Before we have dived one week with Jim Abernathy on de M/V Shearwater and we are used to lemon sharks, reef sharks and even big tiger sharks. I am not blasé, but I have the wrong kind of self-confidence and a feeling of: nothing can happen to me...
Well, we will see about that!

Christina:

There are moments in life that are unforgettable. As I reminisce, an indelible image appears; the first kiss, the first breath on scuba… the first time to achieve something incredible you have dreamt about for a long time.

Sitting down with a nice cup of coffee we still cannot believe what we have experienced today. A little more than half a day of diving lies behind us. Not a normal dive day, no, diving with Tiger Sharks is diving in a different way. You either enjoy or fear these enormous animals. We were to found that out ourselves this day. Family and friends thought we had gone crazy. Tiger Sharks are well known as agressive animals. And we were going to dive with them in open sea. Completely stupid they declared us.

During our last dives all we saw was sand. Where have we ended up this time? No colorful reefs, no beautiful coral gardens, only dull looking sand. This is not what we expected for this trip. We heard many enthusiastic stories from other divers about these dive sites. Could it be that diving on a sandy bottom is really worthwhile? We decided to rely on our guide and continued diving. Fortunately for the next couple of weeks we realized that there really are a lot of different animals living on sandy bottoms. The only thing to do is watch out for them very carefully.

For many divers it is a dream to have the possibility to dive with whales. So when we heard that each year in the months June and July a large number of dwarf minke whales swim along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia our interest was raised. We decided that we would go and examine this phenomenon with our own eyes and went off to Australia.