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 ABOUTfeatured: 30 Best Snorkeling Blogs Fun Ways to enjoy the caribbeanOct 22, 09 Comments Off
 Pillar Corals Good evening one and all! Remember weeks back when I sent out this photo?? I told you I thought it was some kind of coral disease?? Well it just so happens that a top coral researcher named Nick Polato saw the photo and immediately contacted me and told me what is really going on here, I couldn’t have been more wrong!!
Nick writes, the story with the damsel fish is that they find a bit of coral they like and peck off the living coral tissue. The exposed skeleton becomes overgrown with algae that the damsel fish like to eat. The fish defend these little farm territories so aggressively that they will even chase off larger herbivores like parrotfish that would quickly clear away the algae (I have definitely had them bite my fingers while working with the corals & once had one hit me right between the eyes…good thing I had a facemask on). Apparently with the decline of larger predatory fish on reefs worldwide, these little guys have become much more abundant and can be a real threat to reef health. The photo you took is a great example, where you have what appears to be a perfectly healthy coral missing tissue only on that patch at the top of the pillar where there is a thick mat of algae growing on the white skeleton. The angry looking three spot damsel fish staring you down in the center of the photo tops it all off! If you want to hear more about these guys check out this piece NPR did on Bonaire last month.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1117 Aimee and I had a wonderful day. I first took Aimee to the bat caves at Saint Joris as she had never been there before and right after our quick tour we then took the dogs walking along the shore collecting driftwood. We found some great wood this morning all waiting to be transformed into something useable. Aimee slipped on a mossy log and fell on her back, I watched it happen but couldn’t do a thing to help, it happened so fast. So needless to say my dear wife is going to be a bit sore and bruised tomorrow. The dogs had a blast this morning chasing each other thru the water until Indi found a leather glove and just wanted to play with that instead. After we got home we headed to the Aquarium for a dive out on the reef. After going thru our photos I realized we really don’t have many pictures of all the different types of coral?? Yeah how is that possible? We have been shooting sponges now for quite awhile but the corals now need to be photographed as well. Our dive was kind of uneventful maybe because we were only looking for certain things to shoot. Once we got home Aimee took a nap while I did 101 things around the house and around town, no time for napping for this boy!
That’s kind of our day in a nutshell it’s back to work tomorrow for both of us. Hope everyone is doing well, there are so many on the list that we just never hear from Please drop us a quick line to let us know you are still out there. It’s off to bed, see you tomorrow, Barry
22-10-2009
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