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Archive for the ‘Sponges’Feb 3, 10 Comments Off
 Sponge Bob Hi guys, I found another “face on the reef” kind of photo and thought it was worthy of a quick photo. And while on this subject, all you local divers if you see a cool face in the coral, or on a sponge please let me know, I really want to do something fun with them all one of these days, there could be a fun finders fee involved!! This smiley face was on the side of a giant Orange Elephant Ear Sponge and when I spotted it I thought it winked at me?? It could happen. Ok probably not but the mind plays tricks on you below the waters surface sometimes. These holes in the sponge are all natural, it is not damaged, they are called Excurrent Openings. To explain further, as water passes through the sponge, food and oxygen are filtered out. The water exits into the body’s interior cavity and out the animal’s one or more large Excurrent Openings or Oscula. Cool huh and you thought it was just another cute face on the side of a sponge.
I did a fun dive today with a friend from work, it was again rough getting in and out but all in all the dive was pretty fun. We are still having these high waves and strong winds but very little rain and that’s what we need the most. Curacao never got it’s normal winter rainfall this year and the island is getting very dry!!
Hope all is well, the smell of dinner is calling, Barry
Jan 15, 10 Comments Off
 Brown Tube Sponge Good evening guys and gals it’s Friday!! Is it me or did that week go by really fast?? Of course living here on a little Caribbean island I guess all days go by real fast!! I worked at Dolphin Academy till noon and then went over and helped Aimee and her crew with their dolphins for a few hours. After watching Aimee and the girls pull up nets, push floating platforms into the current and train dolphins I now know why she comes home so tired every night, those girls work their butts off!!
Not much else for you tonight, these are Brown Tube Sponges, Agelas conifera that I found out in front of the Sea Aquarium weeks ago. To be honest with you I can’t even remember when I dove last?? Every year at about this same time I start riding the bike more and stop the diving for awhile, just need a little break!!
Hope all is well out there, gotta go, Curacao regards, Barry
Dec 27, 09 Comments Off
 Yellow Tube Sponge Good evening, I am finally sitting down and relaxing after a very long day!! I left the house at 7:00 on my bike and didn’t get back home till 9:00. I started out on all the fun trails around here then headed to the salt ponds, next to Montana, then Saint Joris, Coral Tabak, Canoa, and back home on the ring, it was a long trip. After I got home I quickly showered and ate breakfast then loaded the dogs and took them back to Saint Joris for a two hour hiking adventure. It was a beautiful morning and I didn’t have my camera. I did however find some great driftwood and my first ever hand carved ore, it’s really cool and looks very old. The tide was pretty high this morning meaning I got very wet walking around the rocky shores and the dogs had to swim the whole way. For us the easiest way to get to some of these remote driftwood areas is to just walk in the water around this very rocky shoreline otherwise you would have to risk walking at the top of a very slippery goat trail, I’ll take the water. The rest of the day I went shopping, worked on my driftwood box and most importantly I went over to pick up my camera which arrived yesterday evening!! Our friends Sara and Ann are here for only a week but brought us all kinds of goodies from the States, it was like a second Christmas!! I am so happy to have this camera back and can hardly wait to start using it again, we have to make up for lost time!!
Your photo this evening is yet another from our scenic dive at the famous Mushroom Forest. I think this is a cluster of Yellow Tube Sponges, if anyone thinks different please let me know! I am quickly finding out just how hard it is to identify sponges, they come in so many colors and shapes!! The little darker brown sponge bowl off to the left at the base is a little Touch-Me Not sponge.
Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season, our friends at home are under a ton of snow!! Gotta go, peace out, Barry
Dec 15, 09 Comments Off
 Purple Stove Pipe Sponges SQ Reef Good evening one and all, how are my faithful readers this evening?? Today was some kind of island holiday and just about everything was closed. But the two places I needed to go the most were open, Building Depot and the grocery store! I had to park so far away to get into Building Depot today, it was a giant one day sale on Christmas stuff so half the island was in there! I asked three different locals in the store what they were celebrating today and none of them knew, one didn’t even know it was a holiday??
My day started with a three hour six mile hike with the dogs. I carried my broom and did a whole lot of much needed trail maintenance the whole way, mostly sweeping up loose rocks and sharp thorns that are a bike tire’s worst enemy!! It was a beautiful morning for a walk and ran into countless folks out either hiking or biking as everyone seemed to have the day off.
I put in a lot of time today at home hanging pictures for Aimee, putting up our Christmas stockings (and one for Emily of course), decorating our little artificial tree some more and wrapping a few gifts. At 4:30 I took off like a man on a mission on a fast one hour bike ride. You wouldn’t even know it rained yesterday, everything is dry again! This is one of the cool things about our trails here, after a rain you can pretty much go riding because it’s little rocks and sand not a whole lot of mud.
Just a fun photo from our House Reef, this is a nice little cluster of Purple Stove Pipe Sponges with a bunch of little Brown Chromis swimming around.
That’s about it, Aimee just made a great big salad with grilled chicken on top, it was great!! See you, Barry
Dec 9, 09 Comments Off
 Erect Rope Sponge Hello and good evening. Today we got up early and loaded the dogs and dive gear and headed West to an area called San Juan. It was a long drive in on a really rough dirt road but once we got to our destination it was worth it. We had this whole little beach to ourselves this morning, we never even saw one other person anywhere! We had to park the car up high on a hill and carry all our gear down because only a good four wheel drive would have made it down and back up this crazy hill that ended at the beach. I came down the hill in my wetsuit and tank on and was ready to go, Aimee carried the camera. I did a short one hour exploratory dive while Aimee played with the dogs, collected shells, snorkeled, read a book and took some photos. My dive was fairly uneventful, I saw a baby turtle when I first went out but the second he saw me he took off, I guess you can’t blame him! The visibility there was terrible today, there was zero water movement! I noticed this section of the reef had a lot of alga growing everywhere and I also noticed many big Damselfish Gardens. There seemed to more sponges than coral here which was fine by me, I love the sponges! So I didn’t take that many photos but did get a few cool things like more pics of the Damselfish Gardens that were this time on big sheets of Grooved Brain Coral heads! When I surfaced the dogs launched into the ocean and swam out to greet me, I actually had to hold Indi for a moment so she could catch her breath! We hung out there for another thirty minutes or so looking for shells and taking photos and then decided we had better get moving as it was getting hot and we had a long drive back home.
Your photo this evening is from my dive on Sunday on the Sea Aquarium house reef. Usually most every time I dive our reef I go to the right side of the reef but Sunday I thought lets go left for a change I haven’t been down this way in a long time. It turned out to be a great dive! I found so much great wide angle stuff to shoot that I had either forgotten about or had never seen before. Like this spectacular Erect Rope Sponge with a big trumpetfish hiding alongside. I didn’t even know we had one of these on our reef and this is a big one! These sponges just amaze me, I can’t believe they don’t break?? They must have an incredible hold on the reef to be able to handle the constant surge from the passing waves, because as I watched this one was swaying back and forth from every passing wave.
I’m getting ready to go diving again in about an hour on our house reef, am going on a squid searching safari!! It was a beautiful hot day here and we have the air-co running in all the room, hard to believe our friends back home are in freezing temps right now! Better get moving, Barry
Oct 29, 09 Comments Off
 Mushroom Forest 1 Hello all yes it’s me again! I get so many letters asking and wondering how in the world do you find time to do your blog thing every day?? Well it’s simple, I get daily doses of encouragement from many of my readers and that’s always enough to keep me going another day! Like today I wake up turn on the computer and there is a note from a lady I have never met! Her name is Carol Haralson of Carol Haralson Books, (Google it) well this woman just makes our day every time she writes!! Her notes are filled with compliments and inspiration and shortly after reading them I feel like Super Photographer and race out into the world to find something to shoot! It’s really amazing how far a compliment can take you, try it today and see for yourself, words are a powerful thing! And since I’m on the subject I want to thank all my “Regulars” for always keeping in touch on an almost daily basis, Aimee and I love to get your notes from home!
Here’s a fun shot we took a few weeks ago while Eva was here at one of Curacao’s top dive destination, the Mushroom Forest. More folks go here than any place on the island and for good reason it has all kinds of beautiful coral and sponge formations! It gets it’s name from these super big Star Coral mounds that kind of look like giant mushrooms, “with a good imagination that is”!! This is Aimee hovering above one of the thousands of cool sponge out-crops. The long purple ropes are called Row Pore Rope Sponge and the sponges in the middle are Branching Vase Sponges, it’s just so beautiful!!
We had a fun family outing this morning, Aimee took us to an abandoned land-house she found while out running the dogs on Wednesday. This place must have been built in the early 1800′s and it still looks pretty good, would love to have a million bucks to fix it up, and it has the best view in all of Curacao! The rest of the day was a bit on the lazy side, I went to the doctor for my annual check-up and worked on driftwood creations the rest of the day trying to get some more things ready for sale. Aimee went on a one hour mountain bike ride by herself at 5:30 and I took the dogs for a short walk, that was pretty much our day.
Aimee is leaving for an IMATA conference Saturday morning and will be gone for one week. It will be held in Atlanta this year and is going with two other top trainers from work. Here’s the IMATA site address for those of you interested, www.imata.org/cms.php?home it stands for International Marine Animal Trainers Association.
I’m off to bed, hope you all are doing well, still waiting to hear from some of you e-mail slackers out there! Till tomorrow, Barry
29-10-2009
Oct 17, 09 Comments Off
 New Sponge Hi friends, here’s a cool new sponge we have never seen before. It is Agelas conifera, also called the octopus sponge (but in this case it is growing erect, while it normally falls sideways). This was found thursday on our big group dive at Playa Kalki at around 50-60 feet. After Aimee called me over and we took this photo I thought to myself how many other divers would even look twice at this? Aimee and I have gotten to where we know if something is out of place or different and that’s the stuff we hunt for, I love the little things that most divers over look. I did again send this photo out to a few well know sponge experts so we will just wait and see what they have to say.
Our dear Eva left Curacao this morning at 8:00 with a big smile on her face! We left for the airport at around 5:30 which is a perfect time to drive around Curacao, no traffic at all!! We sure are going to miss her, dive buddies are hard to find around here believe it or not! I think she had a 6 hour lay over in Miami and will arrive in Denver at 8:00 tonight, that’s a real long day!
Aimee and I are so tired this evening, not even the coffee is working! Have a great weekend, Barry
17-10-2009
Oct 9, 09 Comments Off
 Stove pipe Good morning friends, I guess it’s starting to look like the blog is moving back to mornings again, I just don’t seem to have time in the evenings?? Last night we had a four hour quarterly meeting at the Dolphin Academy. The first two hours pretty much consisted of listening to talk about how our numbers can be improved and better ways to help the in-coming tourists. We have noticed Americans are spending less or just are not traveling like they did last year. We had the Adventure here on Wednesday and they hardly bought anything after the swim but the European visitors still seem unaffected for the most part with the economy. The second half of our meeting last night was designed around Team Building. We first got put into groups then handed a list of songs that we had to Karaoke to as a group! So after being served a nice dinner each group got up on stage one by one and did their stuff, I laughed so hard I cried at one point!! Our group sang some crazy song from M&M, kind of like Rap, we had our hats turned sideways and our glasses on trying to the do the best gangster impressions we could think of, I pray that video stays hidden forever!!
Yesterday it rained almost all day here! We ended up staying in and cleaning for the most part, didn’t realize what a mess we had going on here!! I guess when you have piles of driftwood laying around, wood working tools, mountain bikes with dirty tires and two shedding dogs the house can get destroyed fast! Our car doesn’t seem to working well, it’s very noisy in first and second gear, I guess it’s typical of the quality of repair one can expect on a small Caribbean island??
A year or so ago someone asked me “do sponges regenerate if they are broken”? At the time I had no idea, we never really see to many broken sponges out there. Well I found this perfect example the other day at 60 feet out in front of the Sea Aquarium. This is the top of a purple stove pipe sponge that for some reason broke off but is now re-growing a new tube again, cool huh?? I will go back every once in a while and continue to monitor this progress just to see how fast they grow.
Ok, I need to get moving, I have to work today, we pick Eva up tonight and starting Saturday I have a week off. I have a list of photos I will be having her help me with so hopefully we will have some fun stuff to send to you next week. Have a great day all, Barry
8-10-2009
Oct 3, 09 Comments Off
 Touch me not sponge Good morning, here’s a little reef-scene from right out in front of the Sea Aquarium. This is a beautiful cluster of Touch-Me-Not-Sponges and remember these are the sponges that are full of worms! Behind the sponges is a nice chunk of Star Coral that more than likely spawned last month and we never got to see it because of the dumb current! It seems out current is now gone but has been replaced by big waves driven by this strong wind we are still having. I was trying to tell someone the other day the importance of using flash underwater, if you didn’t the whole photo would look like the background in this picture.
Aimee and I are still without the car, I found out that it has something to do with the front wheel drive and or steering, whatever it is it doesn’t sound good. We were unable to take the dogs anywhere yesterday so Aimee just walked them around here. Aimee and I did jump on our bikes and do a grocery run after work, she stayed outside with the bikes and I ran in.
They are still hunting for a missing American Consulate guy here in Curacao, he has now been missing for one week?? They found his clothes at one of the beaches we dive at and that’s about all they seem to know, I myself have heard 100 versions of the story now??
Off to work, talk to you tonight, have a great weekend, Barry
02-10-2009
Aug 24, 09 Comments Off
 Orange Sponge Good evening from Curacao. I have been telling you all now for the past week about this weird sponge I found and as promised here it is?? It’s not very big, only around 6 inches tall but it is beautiful and I have never seen one in these waters before. I was looking thru my sponge book and on page 43 of the Reef Creatures book it does show a Red-Orange Branching sponge, maybe this is just mutated?? I really hope some of my sponge experts on the list or my local divers can help with an I.D.? Aimee and I are returning here on Thursday as I want to get a diver next to it for size, maybe just her face and mask or the o’l magnifying glass trick?
Work was again non-stop!! At 1:30 today I had to run to my eye doctor who sent me home with a clean bill of health saying the eyes looked good. I do however need reading glasses for anything that is real tiny but I can live with that!!
I received an e-mail this evening from our friend Lori who owns the famous Dark Canyon Coffee Company in Rapid City, South Dakota. She read that Aimee is leaving for the states soon and is sending us some “Highlander Groog”, the best coffee I have ever had! You can buy yours at www.darkcanyon-coffee.com tell Lori your on the list as well, always good to make new friends!! Thanks again, we can hardly wait!
That’s about it, the whale is doing great! It followed the boat out to sea today for the first time without nets and came back on it’s own, George and the team of volunteers should get a medal for this or at least a key to the city!
See ya tomorrow, Barry
24-8-2009
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