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 ABOUTfeatured: 30 Best Snorkeling Blogs Fun Ways to enjoy the caribbeanArchive for the ‘Sponges’Dec 6, 10 Comments Off
Good morning all, here’s another cool sponge I found the other day while slowing coming back from my 150 deep dive. This is called a Yellow Tube Sponge. Sponges really decorate the reef, they are like colorful monuments standing tall for all to see and I hope that divers take the time to snap a photo or to just say, “that is so cool! The reef’s around Curacao are covered in silt and sand right now from all these terrible tropical storms we have had, I advise divers to help out and gently use your fin or your hands to “fan off” some silt as you pass by, everything helps. Did you know that, in such places as the Caribbean Sea, sponges can actually filter all of the water in one day!! Yeah think about that one for a minute! And, when a part of a sponge breaks off, the broken part will form a new sponge, see this is why I love sponges, they are just too cool! Because of all this rain my diving has drastically been reduced due to poor visibility. If I try to make beauty pics now there is so much coral bleaching in the background of each shot that it just makes the photos look bad, that’s why I am playing in deeper water at the moment.
Yesterday it rained till around 3:00 and then the sun which we haven’t seen for weeks came out, it was great! I didn’t know we were going to have sun so I left for my Sunday bike ride in the pouring rain at noon and had a soaking wet hour and a half ride, cold but super fun! My goal for the ride was to take a new dry Geocache container to one of my caches called “The Castle” at Caracas baai. I got an e-mail a few weeks back saying the old one was wet and needed replacing so I just replaced the whole thing. For those of you non-cachers you can check it out at www.geocaching.com, it’s a blast! At 5:00 I walked with Aimee and the dogs (in the sun) to our flooded beach that is a mile away where I made my wooden bridge. Well the bridge is still standing but half underwater now due to even more rain and more flooding, it’s really unreal! What I had to do last night was to put plastic bags on my legs and walk thru that nasty water to get to one of my other caches called “Slave Wall”, it’s also in an area that is unaccessible now due to all this water. We moved that one 125 feet West to a dry area and logged the new coordinates last night online, 100 people have found and logged this cache since I placed it there, that’s pretty cool. Also Aimee shot video of me walking thru the water, will get in on You-Tube ASAP for you all to see, it’s pretty funny.
Well off to work, have a wonderful day and remember do something good for the environment this week! Till tomorrow, Barry
Dec 4, 10 Comment (1)
Good morning friends, we are waking up to yet another big tropical downpour so there goes my day off! The first thing we do in the mornings here is let the dogs out to do their thing. But this morning they just stood next to me in the doorway looking at the rain and when I said “go potty” they just looked up at me as if to say “your kidding right” and turned around and ran back in at top speed! I guess I can’t blame them! Geez enough with the rain already we need a week of sun to dry this place out!
I received a nice letter yesterday from an organization called; Guide to Online Schools, read below.
Hi Barry Brown, I am writing to inform you that Coral Reef Photos has been featured on Guide to Online School’s list of the Top 30 Snorkeling blogs found here: http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/library/best-snorkeling-blogs. We hand-picked a list of our favorite snorkeling blogs and outlined the unique reasons why we think they’re great. Your shots are incredibly unique and stunningly breathtaking. We also like your attention to coral reefs and environmental issues. We have created a badge that you are welcome to use anywhere on your site. It is a great way to let your readers know you have been recognized. So that’s very cool, glad to know folks out there are getting something from the daily blog other than just looking at the photo, I will however start working on some snorkeling photos just for them so stay tuned. The turtle photo I sent out yesterday was on the front cover of our local paper here yesterday afternoon and talked about how important these turtles are to the environment and how they are protected and endangered. Here’s a big beautiful Giant Barrel Sponge I found the other day at 131 feet! On our reef the big sponges are usually deep. These giant barrels seem to grow best between the depths of 60-200 feet. There is a giant barrel sponge that we see all the time in the sub at 175 feet that is sitting on the edge of a cliff with a black crinoid attached to it’s rim, it’s so beautiful but to deep for me to get a photo! Did you know there are almost 5,000 different species of sponges and that a new type of sponge is found every year. Also, one of the largest sponges ever found was almost 10 feet wide and some sponges can be found thousands of feet below the oceans surface. Not sure how many of you remember the 6 foot wide sponge we found a few years back in front of the water plant, I should go see if that one is still there. A big congrats to Sea Aquarium on the birth of their new baby dolphin named NOA! She was born on Friday the 29th of October at 6:15pm, mothers name is Gee-Gee, remember her first baby Papito?? This is the first baby dolphin since we have been here that I have not photographed, I have just been too busy with so many other projects but I see her all the time and looks great! Well, it’s still pouring, I need to get the dogs out but not sure how that is going to happen! See you tomorrow, Barry Dec 1, 10 Comments Off
Good morning from Curacao. Yesterday I did another deep dive with my buddy Johnny in front of the Aquarium. Our main mission was to search for invasive Lionfish but since I had my camera and we were in a new area I hunted for new sponges. We went down to 131 feet, and the deeper we went the more sponges we saw. It’s amazing how many cool sponges are at this depth they seem to love the deep water especially Brown Tube Sponges, the reef is littered with them. The downside to us being so deep is we have so little time to search for stuff so as you can imagine I was racing back and forth from one cool sponge to the next before time ran out. I found this cool Brown tube sponge standing straight up at 115 feet, it was like a stop sign saying “take my photo please” which I gladly did! You can also see in this photo a white spot behind the sponge, that was a piece of sheet coral that is totally bleached so even down this deep the corals are having problems. We only found one Lionfish but the sub had spotted others in the area while passing thru, we never found them. As we got closer and closer to the surface the coral bleaching could be seen everywhere again, some looks like it is getting better and some looks worse, it’s so bad I can’t tell!
After work I met a friend for a fast one hour bike ride thru the wilds of Curacao! The ride was exciting to say the least, mud, mosquitoes, rain, walking and pushing the bikes, overgrown trails and cuts all over the arms and legs from thorn buses, good times! I see someone walked a bunch of the trails and did some cutting but left the cuttings laying on the trail, this means flat tires for the bikers. First of all thanks a million for the help but please toss the sharp thorn bush cuttings off the trail the others without thorns can stay, this would help us a lot, I will try and go back and pick those up this week.
Well guys, I have to get to work, we are getting the sub in the water today so I need to get my gear ready to go. Also a big thanks to Dutch for building a new paved parking lot for the Curacao Sea Aquarium, yes it is a bit inconvenient at the moment to try and find parking but soon it will be the nicest parking lot in town!
Later folks, Barry
Nov 12, 10 Comments Off
Hello fellow Earth people, how was your day?? I am guessing pretty good due to the fact that tomorrow is weekend time! Well I had a pretty nice day, I first found a new “Face on the Reef” at 100 feet and for those of you who know me, that made my day! This is a great scary face in a Black Ball Sponge but it is in an area that is very hard to get to. The sponge is hidden inside a coral canyon and the only way I could get to it was to flip my whole body upside down and lower the camera into the small space and take the photo without looking thru the view finder! I had to take a lot of shots to finally get one that was somewhat straight and being upside down with all the blood rushing to your head doesn’t help plus being at 100 feet really, really didn’t help! Ahh the things we do for photos, ok, the things I do for photos is that better. The rest of my dive was spent shooting the overwhelming amount of Coral Bleaching on the reef, it almost made me sick to look at it’s that bad! The reef is now 65-70% bleached above the 60 foot mark, below 60 foot it’s still pretty good and mostly unaffected!
Tomorrow I will be at the Heineken Regatta in Punda from 11:00 to 4:00 or 5:00, stop by and say hi if you can. For you photographers on the list there will be hundreds of colorful sail boats everywhere tomorrow for the race so it’s bound to be a major Kodak-Moment!
That’s about it for my day, enjoy your relaxing well deserved weekend and for those of you who have been bad in not writing us, please drop a line to let us know your still out there.
Bye now, Barry
Nov 9, 10 Comments Off
Dear friends, this is something strange I found the other day and was hoping my sponge and coral experts out there could help me find out what it is? It’s fairly small, around 6 inches wide by 5 inches tall but is something I had never seen before. We divers love finding new and unusual things, in fact I think it is exactly that reason why we keep going back so often, you just never know what you will find.
The waters surrounding Curacao are still a complete mess after a week of terrible rain! Because the waves are rolling in from the West (something that rarely happens) it’s creating complete chaos along the whole South side of the island! Usually our Sea Aquarium area is very well protected as it’s designed for the normal waves that roll in from the South-East but now they are rolling in from the South-West so now they are able to enter areas where normally we have breaks. Does that make any sense? These waves have just beat the beaches here and taken much of the valuable sand back out to sea, it’s such a mess, I am not looking forward to seeing the reef after all this is over.
Yesterday was a fairly boring day, not much going on at all besides everyone cleaning up mess after mess. I am sorry but my mind is blank this morning, need to get ready for work.
Have a great day, Barry
Nov 6, 10 Comments Off
Good morning gang, I first want to say thanks for all who answered yesterdays blog, you folks are safe and sound. For those of you who have been with me for awhile you know how much I love finding new “faces on the reef” and yesterday I found a new one! It’s so fun to be swimming along and enjoying your dive and see a face looking back at you and thankfully I had a camera with me. This face was found in a small Orange Elephant Ear sponge that I found at 60 feet out in front of the sub-station. For you other photographers out there that dive and carry a camera you already now how difficult it is shoot this particular sponge as too much flash can kill the orange color and too little makes it look like a dark blob. I usually use a long F-stop like F22-F29 with just a small amount of flash and it seems to work out just perfect. As you know the word “Sponge” is a simple word used to discuss these animals. Sponges are known by scientists as porifera. In Latin, this means “pore-bearing.” The pores, or tiny holes, in the skin of a sponge let water in so that the sponge can extract oxygen and food for all of its cells to stay alive. The water passes by the mesohyl, also called the mesenchyme which contains cells and the sclerocytes. Sclerocytes make spicules. After the water is filtered, it is pushed out of the sponge. First it goes to a hollow area called the spongocoel, which is a large, empty cavity. Sponges contain one large hole at the top of their bodies, known as an osculum, and they also have smaller holes on the sides known as ostia. With so much water flowing in and out of a sponge every day, sponges in the Caribbean Sea can filter the entire sea in just one day. That’s pretty impressive for an animal that was thought to be a plant until the year 1765!!!
Hey have a wonderful day guys, I have to run! Be back, Barry
Oct 27, 10 Comments Off
Hi guys, “M” is the word for today, mud, moisture, muck, and mosquitoes!! Rain, rain, rain!! Because of all this rain biking has ceased, our hiking at Saint Joris is a thing of the past and our dog walks are short and fast ending with showers at home the minute we walk in the door. Yesterday I spent most of the day in my little studio shooting shells again as there were no sub dives. Today I think we have two sub dives in the afternoon meaning I will be in the water a lot today. I really don’t have a whole lot for you all today things are quiet and wet.
Coral bleaching here in the Caribbean continues to worsen by the day and this rain is not helping at all! I am going to try and do a dive on our Sea Aquarium “House Reef” this morning to get a first hand look at the damage.
Here is another fun reef scene for you all day that we found in front of the glass beach that we go to all the time. This is a big cluster of Purple Stove Pipe sponges sitting on top of a big mound of Starlet coral. The stripped fish at the base of the sponges is a juvenile Princess Parrotfish, the others are Brown Chromis, a Bluehead wrasse and a little yellow juvenile Threespot Damselfish.
I better get moving, thanks for all your comments we read them all. Barry
Oct 24, 10 Comments Off
Greetings from the Curacao sea shore this fine Sunday evening. I pray you all had a wonderful and productive weekend or at least let’s hope you did because we all know what day it is tomorrow. I had to go into work this morning as we had a guy here from CNN who did a sub dive with us. I have no idea what his plans are or where we will see a story and pictures but will let you know when I hear something. I left work around noon and had the rest of the day off. I managed to keep myself busy all afternoon and was nice to just kick back and do nothing. Aimee is feeling better, she got home early today from work and we both watched a movie on HBO that I have seen a zillion times called “Outbreak” but Aimee had never seen it? After that she went to collect beach glass and I took the dogs to the jungle, that’s our day in paradise!
Here’s a spectacular weird shaped Elephant Ear Sponge I found out in front of Zanzibar the other day while doing the dive with the sub. Usually these sponges look like the one in the background but this one was a beautiful full size barrel and it was just screaming to have it’s picture taken.
That’s all for tonight, see you tomorrow, Barry
Oct 16, 10 Comments Off
Hey gang, it’s the weekend!! I am completely wiped out this evening after doing 4 short dives with the sub! It’s not the diving that gets me it’s the getting in and out with all this heavy gear and the hot blazing sun! My normal routine is to be in the water before the sub makes it’s way out onto the reef. I then spend around 5-15 minutes taking photos of the guests inside and taking pictures of the reef (like the big school of Boga’s) and that’s it, back out I go. Once out, I have to rinse everything in fresh water including the camera and myself then get the camera back inside where it is warm and dry. Then I dry the camera, open it, remove the flash drive and down-load the goods. Once downloaded I work on them a bit in Photoshop, put them on a custom Substation flash drive and then we wait for the customers or VIP’s to return. So I did that four times today! The part I like most about all this is having extra time every dive to do a little exploring after the clients have disappeared into the darkness of the reef. I can usually hear the sub below me even if it is very deep but you have no way of knowing where it really is. Here’s a new fluorescent orange Elephant Ear Sponge that I found today and it was home to all kinds of different fish. Inside the sponge were two beautiful Banded Butterflyfish and they made it clear that this was their sponge and they were not leaving, fine by me! The purple fish above are Creole Wrasses and the gray one’s are Brown Chromis and the combination of all made for another colorful reef scene.
I am so tired, off to bed for me! Later, Barry
Jul 20, 10 Comments Off
Hi friends, not a lot to report this evening as the sub has been inside for the past few days but tomorrow we have customers and will probably do around three trips. In one of the sub dives tomorrow I will be going inside the sub to a big sunken ship that lays at around 450 feet deep, we are going to try and make some nice photos from inside. After work I met a friend for a fast one hour ride. We ended up riding on all the trails in the area behind the aquarium and down by the salt ponds. Speaking of the salt ponds they are again filling up with water from all this rain we have had lately, really strange weather year!
Here’s another fun photo from my last trip to the Eastpoint. This is Eric checking out a beautiful little cluster of purple stove pipe sponges, these are about as good as they get. I found it very hard to concentrate on the job at hand as there was so much stuff to photograph, it’s really the place to dive in Curacao!
Very tired, sorry so short, back tomorrow, Barry
Jun 24, 10 Comments Off
Hi readers, here’s something fun from my dive today at Directors Bay with the World Famous Dive Bus Hut crew. These are natural faces on the side of a big Orange Elephant Ear sponge, Agelas clathrodes. I found one sponge today that had so many fun faces on it that I thought I would send you a bunch all at once, yeah I know “what a wild imaginanition”! Here’s some text from a fun site called Sea and Sky, “many sponges are extremely plant-like in appearance but are actually one of the most primitive animals in the sea. They belong to a group called porifera. Most of us are familiar with the dried colorless varieties that populate the kitchens and bathrooms of the world. But in the ocean, live sponges can be found in an infinite variety of colors and shapes. Most of them are relatively small, but some varieties can grow to over 6 feet in diameter. Sponges differ from all other marine invertebrates in that they have no true tissues or organs. Their structure is composed of simple aggregations of cells. The name porifera means pore bearer. The tissue of sponges encloses a vast network of chambers and canals that connect to the open pores on their surface. Sponges feed by drawing a current of water in through their pores, filtering out the nutrients, and then ejecting it out through an opening. Many sponges on the coral reef resemble some of the corals in shape and color, but upon closer inspection the difference is apparent. They are one of the many life forms unique to the ocean environment”. check out www.seasky.org for even more information. Did you know that a report in 1997 described use of sponges as a tool by bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia. A dolphin will attach a marine sponge to its rostrum, which is presumably then used to protect it when searching for food in the sandy sea bottom .The behavior, known as ”Sponging” has only been observed in this bay, and is almost exclusively shown by females. A study in 2005 concluded that mothers teach the behavior to their daughters, and that all the sponge-users are closely related, suggesting that it is a fairly recent innovation, cool huh, I love sponges!
I had another really busy day and it’s 8:00 and I still haven’t had dinner, where’s Aimee??? Went to Saint Joris with the dogs very early and cleaned trash for 2 hours then met my friends for a fun drift dive, then went shopping, then did a 3 hour bike ride and finally took the dogs back out for their evening walk and filled up all my bird feeders in the desert with water. That’s it for me today, till tomorrow, Barry
Apr 24, 10 Comments Off
Good evening readers, this is going to be fast because Aimee and I are going over to a friends house in just a few minutes.
This turned out to be one of the coolest sponges I found or should I say Sal found in Bonaire. When I got home I looked and looked for this sponge in books and on-line and couldn’t find a thing and we really needed a name. So I sent a note to Sven Zea, Ph.D. Professor Titular, Universidad Nacional de Colombia who is one of the leading sponge authorities in the World, check out their site at www.spongeguide.org Sven immediately wrote us back and confirmed that this was a beautiful cluster of Callyspongia fallax. He also went on to say that it is rare to see this variety spreading so much because usually you only find these sponges in small colonies. A big thanks to Tim Henkel as well for first identifying this sponge and then sending me to Sven for confirmation. Also we have another sponge expert on our list Brendan Biggs that is constantly helping with names and correcting us when we are wrong, we really appreciate his comments and information as well!!
Sorry but I have to go, puppies are doing great, photos soon!! Bye, Barry
Apr 21, 10 Comments Off
Good evening readers, we are officially the owners of three new cute puppies!! Aimee went this morning and easily found and picked up two of them and at the time could not find the third. She immediately brought them home and gave them around five baths each removing ticks and fleas and cleaning a few small wounds. At 2:00 she took them to the vet who then gave them some heartworm medication, and other stuff for their skin problems and the fleas and ticks, no parvo shots yet. The vet said since they just were given all these other meds that they need to wait a week before receiving their first official shots. The pups then slept very quietly all day in the puppy coral I built. At 5:00 Aimee took off in search of the other and moments later returned with a smile on her face! She then took off again with the new one to the vet and then once home gave that one five baths and now all three are busy chewing on rawhide sticks and seem very happy! So far so good! I will wait a few days for their skin to heal and then do a puppy photo shoot, I can hardly wait. We are obviously counting on you guys out there to help us with homes. Aimee will be more than happy to deliver one to the States in July if your interested so please think about it or ask around.
This is a yellow or cream Azure Vase Sponge. Most of you have seen these in purple from me more than the yellow, this color is much harder to find. Most of you already know that sponges are animals and come in many sizes, shapes and colors. You know I was wondering how many divers out there ever take the time to swim over to a sponge like this and really check it out?? Many times if you swim over and look down inside the tubes you will see small fish or crabs that use these beautiful sponges as their homes. Please for me the next time your out diving start paying closer attention to the sponges and tell me if you find one that really stands out, I would love to photograph it.
That’s it for tonight, the puppies are now playing, I hear a little growling and little barks! Bye, Barry
Apr 15, 10 Comments Off
 Bonaire Reef Scene with Patty Good morning all, looking thru my Bonaire photos I sent out already I noticed I had not sent one out of our friend Patty yet and found this one just waiting to be sent. Patty is Sal’s wife and while in Bonaire they had me over for dinner quite a few times, and let me tell you there’s nothing like a home cooked meal while on vacation!! I can’t remember which dive site this was at but I think it was Red Beryl again?? I remember we had just got to the edge of the reef and this sponge cluster was the first thing I spotted, it stood out like a sore thumb! This was the first time I had ever seen Yellow Tube sponges growing next to Purple Stove Pipe sponges and then topped off with Green Finger sponge all around the base, it was a beautiful specimen. The other thing that really stands out in my mind was all the fish on this dive, it Brown Cromis Heaven! Patty timed her swim over perfectly and I was able to get a few of her above the sponge cluster before we moved on in search of other fascinating things.
Not much new going on, Aimee and I are headed out to do some trail work soon but other than that the day is still unwritten. Better go, talk to you more tonight, Barry
Apr 7, 10 Comments Off
 Red Boring Sponge Good evening all, guess what, it’s finally raining!!! We woke this morning to standing water and a light rain and it hasn’t stopped all day, it’s so great! This island needed rain so bad, our desert is completely brown and most of the cacti are dying so this couldn’t have come at a better time! It was a difficult day at work trying to take photos outside but with the help of others we were able to photograph from under umbrellas.
This is one of my personal favorites from Bonaire. This is something I haven’t seen much in Curacao but in Bonaire I found three or four fantastic specimens. This is called Red Boring Sponge, Cliona delitrix. What your looking at folks is a red to red-orange sponge that at first glance appears to be an encrusting sponge, but actually bores into coral heads. They do this by secreting minute amounts of acid. From the exterior there is usually no visible damage, however the corals interiors may be riddled with tunnels and chambers that may eventually cause their structures to disintegrate. For those of you who remember sponges draw water in from hundreds of tiny holes called Incurrent Pores and exits into the body’s interior cavity and out the animals one or more large Excurrent Openings or Oscula. It’s easy to see the excurrent openings here. I have friends here that are starting to call me a “sponge freak” or maybe “sponge geek” would be better, but they are so cool! Some of this text was again from our underwater Bible, the Reef Creature Identification book by Paul Humann and Ned Deloach without these books we would be lost.
Thanks for all the mail helping me find a name for my little reptile I sent out yesterday. The real name is a Spectacled Teju, Gymnophthalmus lineatus or as others call it here a Red Tailed Skink. Thanks to everyone for helping.
It’s still raining, this will make our walk with the dogs tomorrow very interesting! We went to see the new movie from DreamWorks last night called “How to train a Dragon” it was great! See you tomorrow, Barry
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