What a day! A great start to the fish collecting, and now we’re back on the boat after the first dive the fish biologists are already deep in animated conversation about what they saw. In fact, they started talking about what they’d seen as soon as their heads popped out of the water!
This is North Meyer island, where Trevor and Peter went ashore today to collect bugs and plants
They’ve pulled out piles of reference books so they can check species identification, and they think they have one or two new records for the Kermadecs, meaning that this is the first time a species of fish has been seen here. That’s about all I can tell you at the moment as they’ve put the first fish on ice for the moment, while they get on with planning their second dive of the day. I’ll tell you more about the fish later on, when they get around to sorting everything out properly, and after we’ve done the second dive of the day.
As soon as the fish are brought back to the ship by the divers they are put in ice in a big fish bin until they can be sorted – you can just make out some of the fish
So what was it like out in the water? Warm and clear sum it up. The water temperature was 22 degrees, and we could see about 20 metres, which made those of us from Wellington (where the water is cold and murky) very happy! We took turns diving to a flat sandy site that was about 20 metres deep, at the bottom of a rock wall. There were many different kinds of fish, and after a while a couple of spotted black grouper (from just under a metre in length to one and half metres long) and a handful of Galapagos sharks (ranging in size from 80 centimetres in length to two or so metres) came in to check everything out. It was great to see such big fish up close, and completely fearless around people – this is a marine reserve, so of course there is no fishing, and the fish have nothing to be afraid of.
These fish are commonly known as toadstool groupers, because they have little white spots on a red background, which is similar to amanita toadstools. They also have a scientific name: Trachypoma macracanthus, which is nothing to do with toadstools!
Several people have written in to ask if we’ve seen jellyfish, and how we’re going to deal with stinging jellyfish. Well, I’m sorry to report that nobody saw any jellyfish today. I asked Stephen Keable, a marine invertebrate expert from the Australian Museum how you would collect stinging jellyfish and his answer was ‘very carefully’! We’ll let you know if we see any during the trip, and if we do hopefully Richie Robinson will get some photos of them (in which case we’ll post them here). Would they be new species? Mmm, I’m not sure we really know much about jellyfish so you never know.
