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 ABOUTfeatured: 30 Best Snorkeling Blogs Fun Ways to enjoy the caribbeanOLDER POST:Dive Charter Curacao, Eastpoint Dive Trip, CaveNEWER POST:Caribbean Wildflowers, Curacao Flowers, TropicalJun 19, 10 Comments Off
Good evening friends we found something NEW, this is called Sea Fan Black Coral! This is something I have never seen in Curacao and can hardly wait to get back and spend more time photographing it. A few species like this Sea Fan Black Coral attain considerable size and their branches are collected, cut, fashioned, polished and sold by jewelers as a semiprecious material. The value of these trinkets comes more from jewelers propaganda of rareness and the danger associated with deep diving to collect branches, than from any innate property of the material itself. In fact, the black coral species most frequently used by jewelers is neither rare or found particularly deep. Unfortunately, it is now very rare in many areas from over-harvesting. The great black coral forests of the Grand Cayman and Cozumel are only a memory now, destroyed by greed and fascination! It will take these slow growing colonies over 100 years to reestablish themselves. In March 2009, scientists released the results of their research on deep-sea (depths of ~300 to 3,000 m) corals throughout the world. They discovered a subdivision of Black Coral, A Leiopathes sp. specimens, to be among the oldest continuously living organisms on the planet; around 4,265 years old! They show that the “radial growth rates are as low as 4 to 35 micrometers per year and that individual colony longevities are on the order of thousands of years”. I did a quick Google search and couldn’t believe how much black coral there is for sale, I had no idea?? Please folks be very aware of what you buy now a days, no more black or red coral jewelry, shark fin soup or turtle shell jewelry, it’s up to us to save what we have left. For me getting to see this Black Coral was the highlight of my whole East coast Dive trip, it’s the most beautiful coral I have ever seen! Moments before getting to the first piece one of my flashes failed so I was left with only one flash making wide angle photos very difficult or close to impossible, just my luck! This piece you see here was about three times this size, I just didn’t have the right lens but will be trying it again ASAP. The second dive we did was just unbelievable! I have never seen so many healthy and different corals in one spot not to mention all the fish! The dive started out with us finding two super big nurse sharks resting under a big coral ledge in the sand. One of them was at least 12 feet long if not more, that was the largest creature I have seen so far in Curacao on a dive. This second East coast dive we did was hands down the best and most beautiful place I have seen in Curacao! If your an advanced diver looking for “The Spot” to dive, give www.divechartercuracao a call you won’t be disappointed!
I have a small correction this evening, it seems I gave you the wrong address for Aimee, I spelled something wrong try this, aimeedolphins@yahoo.com that should work!
My car is still down for the count I will have to wait till Monday to get it somewhere for repair, I was told that the fuel injectors could be dirty or something like that? See you all again tomorrow, Barry
OLDER POST:Dive Charter Curacao, Eastpoint Dive Trip, CaveNEWER POST:Caribbean Wildflowers, Curacao Flowers, TropicalSITE MAP
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