Communauté

Partagez vos réflexions, votre expérience ou vos questions, et participez à des discussions à propos de votre activité favorite : la plongée !

Laser sizing

par Ksso le 11 février 2011

Classic conversation after a dive :

Diver1 : Have you seen the grouper - it was huuuuge ! almost 2 meters long ! (note : that's unlikely ). Check out the pic I took !Diver2 : Bull***** - You kiddin', that's more like 20cm tops...

Now, there's a real point in that conversation : evaluating the proper size of something underwater wether it's a fish, a wreck or a cave, is quite complicated. And the pictures taken do miss scale to enable proper evaluation of the subject size.Working with the University of Queensland, the Marine Megafauna Foundation and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, a team of researchers led by Chris Rohner has come up with a new technique to add a scale to underwater...

Fish mondays : the Pufferfish (& the Fugu)

par Ksso le 8 février 2011

The Pufferfish ( scientific name : Tetraodontidae) is a fairly common fish that can be encountered especially easily on the US , Australian and western African coasts. The Puffer fish can be also referred ad balloonfish, blowfish, bubblefish, globefish, swellfish, toadfish, toadies, honey toads, sugar toads, and sea squab and represents a family of about 121 species within 20 genera.The blowfish eat mostly crustaceans and mollusks whose shells they crush with their four teeth (thus the scientific name).Puffer fish are generally believed to be the second–most poisonous vertebrate in the world, after the Golden Poison Frog. One of its best known representant is the japanese Fugu fish which...

How nets kill to protect our fears

par Ksso le 6 février 2011

Shark Angels - on Shark Nets from Shark Angels on Vimeo.

Very striking video made by the "Shark Angels" about the rampage done by nets. The most appalling thing is that those net don't only target sharks but dolphins, turtles and other harmless animals die there too.Again, it's a recall that actually few types of sharks are dangerous: of the existing 368 species of sharks, only 20 are dangerous to humans. Of them, four account for almost 60-70 shark attacks registered annually worldwide.If you were as appalled as I was by those images, go ahead and sign the petition at removethenets.com .

Whales in Hawaii

par Ksso le 3 février 2011

View Kailua-Kona, HI in a larger mapSee this blue dote on the map above ? Feel free to zoom-in ... there's Hawaii and more precisely Kona. Steve is a dive instructor there and just shared on his blog that there is a peak in whale activity in that region. If you're fascinated by these giant mammals, seems like Hawaii and Kona is the place to be.

Thousands of sharks spotted off Palm Beach

par Ksso le 2 février 2011

Pilot Steve Irwin a pilot with "Island Marine Services" based in Fort Pierce. As he was flying his helicopter on tuesday 100 yards away off Palm Beach he spotted this massive amount of sharks schooling together. He pulled his iPhone and took the video embedded above.Apparently it is this time of the year when sharks are migrating towards warm water.

Stop eating shark fin soup

par Ksso le 28 janvier 2011

Gordon Ramsay produced a documentary that aired Sunday 16th January, 9pm on Channel 4 in UK. If you're not familiar with Gordon, he's a pretty famous chef with a strong propension of using the "F" word and popular for his show "Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares".In this documentary he covers the use of shark fin that serve as base ingredient for a popular meal in Asia, the shark fin soup.This documentary came as a shocker for me highlighting a few facts:

Sharks are an endangered species - the population dropped by over 60% in less than 10 years and may disappear at this rate within the century (with terrible consequencies for the balance of our ecosystem) ...

Spot On : The dwarf seahorse

par Ksso le 23 janvier 2011

Wikipedia teaches us the followings:The dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae) is a species of seahorse. It is found in the Bahamas and the United States. Its natural habitat is subtidal aquatic beds. It is threatened by habitat loss. According to Guinness World Records, it is the slowest moving fish, with a top speed of about five feet per hour (152 cm per hour).It is most often white in color but can range from tan, brown, yellow and green. In the wild, it often has small skin growths called cirri that resemble algae.

The reason I wanted to write a "Spot On" that tiny seahorse is that as wikipedia mentioned, its natural habitat is endangered. Conservationists from the Zoological Society...