Clownfish (Anemonefish) – The Little Beautiful Fish in Marine

Whenever you dive I'm sure that you always meet the group of cute clownfish which enliven the underwater world. However, are you sure that you have already known them well, if you say no, let's see the following interesting info quickly.


Photo: Arne Kuilman

Clownfish and anemonefish are fishes from the subfamily Amphiprioninae in the family Pomacentridae. About twenty eight species are recognized, one in the genus Premnas, while the remaining are in the genus Amphiprion. In the wild they all form symbiotic mutualisms with sea anemones. Depending on species, clownfish are overall yellow, orange, reddish, or blackish, and many show white bars or patches and the tips of their fins have a thin black rounded stripe. The largest reach a length of 18 cm, while the smallest barely reach 10 cm. Also, they live at the bottom of the sea in sheltered reefs or in shallow lagoons, usually in pairs.

Furthermore, the unique qualification of them that made me surprised is about the reproduction. Clownfish live in small groups inhabiting a single anemone. The group consists of a breeding pair, which cohabits with a few non-reproductive, "pre-pubescent", and smaller male clownfish. When the female dies, the dominant male changes sex and becomes the female. This life history strategy is known as sequential hermaphroditism. In addition, clownfish are all born as males, they are protandrous hermaphrodites which are in contrast with another form of hermaphroditism, known as protogyny, in which all fish are born as females but can change to males later. Clownfish can lay hundreds or thousands of eggs depend on the species and they were the first type of marine ornamental fish to be successfully bred in captivity on a large scale.


Photo: emphasis

Normally, Clownfish are not eaten by other fish and live safely at the quiet corners of the Coral reef. But, their greatest threat is human. If you don't believe me, you can see that many of them are living in the aquarium or at the rich man's home and many Coral reefs have been destroyed by human too. Moreover, Clownfish become popular for now so I'm afraid that you will not see them in the nature in the future.
Anyway, it's a good luck for them that some conservationists have found the method for helping them like raising them and their habitat. But, you can also be the part of preserving Clownfish, no need to do the great thing and spend too much money; you just begin to aware of the nature around you. Not only the aquatic animals but you can also attend to all environments in our world.

Underwater Moai - Rapa Nui

On dry land our dive master turned guide and we headed off to Rano Raraku, a kind of quarry from which the original Moai were carved centuries ago. It's a strange place and the remnant of an extinct volcano. Wild horses drink in its crater lake. Dozens of Moai are scattered in the vicinity; the ones that never made it to their intended resting places. Down at 20 meters there was a surprise with underwater Moai. It was a replica, the dive master told us it was dropped down there by a local as a remembrance.


Photo: untitled-project.com

Some stand half buried, others have fallen and many more remain unfinished, part carved from the mountainside. Most are about 6-8 metres tall, though the largest is unfinished and a whopping 21 metres. No metal tools were used to create the Moai, instead they were carved using stone on stone. How the Moai came to stand at their various resting places around the island remains a mystery.

"Rapa Nui" or "Easter Island" is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile annexed in 1888, Easter Island is widely famous for its monumental statues, called moai which created by the Rapanui people.

Rapa Nui is a world heritage site with much of the island protected within the Rapa Nui National Park. one of the world's most remote inhabited islands, is no less an nigma than how their descendants could design and sculpt hundred of colossal moai from hard volcanic tuff, transport these tall and heavy statues great distances from quarry to coast and erect them on great stone ahu (platforms). Residents and visitors have applied various names to this small, isolated volcanic land-mass.


Photo: designer-daily.com

The Polynesian settlers named it Rapa Nui, but the view of the seemingly infinite sea from the summit of Terevaka, the island's highest point, reveals why they also called it Te Pito o Te Henua - the Navel or centre of the World. From Eater Island, a vessel can sail any direction with out sighting inhabited land.

Dutch mariner Jacob Roggeveen, the first European to sight the island, named it Easter Island, after the date of his discovery; the Spaniards first called it San Carlos. Other mariners dubbed it Davis's Land after confusing it with territory identified by the 17th-century English pirate Edward Davis. Roggeveen's legacy survived among Europeans. English speakers call it Easter Island. Spanish speakers refer to Isla de Pascua, Germans to Osterinsel.

A further word on terminology: What exactly to call the island in inhabitants and their language has been a topic of hairsplitting contention. It is more probable that Polynesians settled the island from the west. these peoples managed to disperse over a myriad of islands within a gigantic triangle whose apexes were at New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui, plus a handful of islands deep in Melanesia. Orthodox academic opinion currently favors an Asiatic origin for the Polynesian peoples who, apparently, built the Rapa Nui monuments.


Photo: gordonmackie.com

Details vary, but there is general agreement that migration into the Pacific region began 50,000 years ago, when ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals and New Guinea highlanders first crossed the sea in search of new homelands. some people argue that the two-word term 'Rapa Nui' is an imperial imposition that the single word 'Rapanui' more closely approximates usage in other Polynesian languages.

Source gordonmackie.com, janesoceania.com, untitled-project.com

World of the Most Beautiful Tropical Paradise

Palau is a famous destination for diving. It offers some of the most unique holiday possibilities: its natural beauty, intact culture, untouched wilderness, remoteness and stability combine to offer the adventure seekers. Palau's most populous islands are Angaur, Babeldaob, Koror, and Peleliu. Palau has been described as one of the Seven Underwater Wonders of the World, with 700 species of coral and 1,200 species of identified fish.


Photo: cieer.org

The latter three lie together within the same barrier reef, while Angaur is an oceanic island several miles to the south. Palau is located between Guam, Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Palau offers an endless variety of sites to dive, from caves to walls and major dropoffs, to tunnels, channels and shallow reefs, where you can enjoy great visibiity and an almost limitless variety of marine life. Palau is rated as one of the world's best diving destinations by scuba aficionados.

There is 400 miles long archipelago, which became to be one of the world's unique phenomena "Rock Island". The coral atoll of Kayangel is situated north of these islands, while the uninhabited about 200 are situated to the west of the main island group. There are also parts of the country and make up the states of Hatohobei and Sonsorol. Imagine the whitest beaches you will ever see, gardens of coral just beneath the clearest waters, lakes filled to the brim with "sting less" jellyfish.

Explore caves, waterfalls and forests that have never been ravaged by man, and hundreds of islands of the purest beauty abound all along our pristine archipelago. These mushroom like islets are uninhabited and located in a large lagoon that has vast concentration of corals, fish and other marine life. White sand beaches, lush jungle and remote waterfalls are just among the highlights of Palau. The most amazing array of marine life you can ever imagine.


Photo: hanz.schulz

No matter your level of diving ability, there is a dive for you in Palau, fast drift dives, easy shallow dives, it's all here in Palau. It provides some of the best diving to be found in Micronesia and ideally suited for advanced divers. Explore the beauty of Palau with Scuba World Explorer Fleet. You can expect mostly wall and drift diving with visibility ranging from 60 feet to in excess of 150 feet, depending on prevailing conditions.

The tenders, however, are provided with ladders. Diving in Palau from a live aboard is better suited to those with considerable open-water experience, with the ability to maintain Perfect Buoyancy Control, and who are comfortable getting in or out of a dive tender.

No Tank - No Thanks, I Do Not Need A Scuba Tank.

Because I'm a freediver. I use mask, fin and wet-suit when I want to dive. Freedivers said! Freediving is any of various aquatic activities that share the practice of breath-hold underwater diving. The activity that garners the most public attention is competitive apnea, an extreme sport, in which competitors attempt to attain great depths, times or distances on a single breath without direct assistance of scuba.


Photo: Iner

Freediving is the sport of breath hold diving in which the freediver descends under water on a single breath of air. Freediving includes leisure activities such as spearfishing and snorkelling as well as competitive disciplines: Constant Weight, Free Immersion, Variable Weight, No Limits, Dynamic and Static Apnea. Freediving is a technique used with various aquatic activities. While in general all aquatic activities that include breath-hold diving might be classified as a part of freediving, some sports are more accepted than others.

Freediving has many benefits and can be compared to a martial art. It promotes increased lung capacity, deeper levels of awareness and perception and control over your body. The discussion remains whether freediving is only a synonym for breath-hold diving or whether it describes a specific group of underwater activities. It is often strongly associated with competitive breath-hold diving or Competitive Apnea. The remainder of this article will discuss only competitive freediving as an athletic sport. Freediving is also an intriguing recreational sport, celebrated as a relaxing, liberating, and unique experience.

World Champion Freediver
In October 2007 Sara Campbell became the first woman to hit the 90m mark in freediving using only the natural propulsion of her monofin. She also scored a hat trick by setting three world records in three days, in fact in under 48 hours, ruling in all deep disciplines. And just ten days later she became World Champion in Constant Weight. Amazingly she had made her first competitive dive only seven months previously. In April 2nd 2009. Sara Campbell breaks a new woman freediving World Record in the Bahamas by diving to 96m in constant weight.


Photo: The Blue Mile Gallery

Get Start Freediving
While others may dive deeper and longer, a 45-second dive to 30 feet places you in the action. Since most of the ocean's color and animal life resides within 30 feet of the surface, there's little reason to go deeper. Forty-five seconds buys you enough time to gather game, take a photo or simply mingle as one with the fish.

Best of all, the average person can master these dives in just two weeks without spending valuable travel dollars on gear. Your essentials mask, snorkel, fins, wetsuit and weight belt-pack easily into a duffle bag. They're inexpensive yet eloquent enhancements to any aquatic vacation. You needn't be an athlete to enjoy freediving because the sport is more about mind-set, technique and correct weighting than strength.

Your goal is to join the water, rolling with the gentle sea surface, never fighting it. When you learn the basic surface dive, you'll find that it takes very little energy to slip below the surface. Relaxed and confident, you choose the depth and duration of each dive. How should you learn freediving? Not like the newlyweds I observed in Hawaii. Offering verbal support, the young man coaxed his lady into the water. Timidly she placed the unfamiliar snorkel into her mouth, flip-flopped to the reef's edge and jumped in.


Photo: e m m a

So, Freediving is about familiarity, ease, relaxation and energy conservation. To learn to freedive, find a competent, patient instructor who will guide you through the selection of your gear and who can introduce you to the basic elements of the sport in a step-wise, confidence-building fashion.

Just avoid advancing one step until you're competent with the last. Choose a comfortable mask and fins, sit by the pool's edge and become familiar with mouth-breathing through the snorkel. Step into the pool waist deep, dip your head underwater and continue breathing. Freedivers utilize two positions, horizontal and inverted, positions not usually associated with sporting activities. Advance to the horizontal by holding the pool's edge and floating face down. Breathe slowly and a little deeper to compensate for the useless "dead-space air" in your snorkel. Take a deep breath, completely submerge your head and let the snorkel fill with water. Still looking down, raise your head level with the surface and again clear the snorkel. Later, you'll learn to let a small amount of air escape into your snorkel as you ascend from a dive.

Now you're ready for the most important exercise in freediving: the "relaxed fetal position." The feelings and sensations you derive from this exercise provide your psychological base. It's the state of mind you need to recall and maintain throughout your freediving career. Breathing on the surface, simply float on your stomach, curl up into the fetal position and totally relax. Some divers come close to sleep.


Photo: mst7022

Freedivers use three fin strokes: the flutter, frog and dolphin. You'll use the flutter kick most of the time. Use the frog kick, the slower of the three, to relieve cramped and tired flutter-kick muscles. The dolphin kick is great for short bursts of speed. Make sure you use short kicks and not deep leg kicks that bend the blade more than 30 degrees. When your stroke bends the blade excessively, water spills off the side and wastes energy. Take a cue from the fish to pick up speed, use rapid small fin beats, not wide movements. The surface dive is a complex yet easily mastered maneuver. It's basic to the sport.

To get an idea of how the surface dive works, lie on your bed, belly down. Scoot over the edge until you're balanced at the waist. Now, lower one arm and raise the opposite leg. The weight shift sends you immediately down. In the water, initiate the dive by kicking forward to gain momentum. Fold your shoulders together to help you exhale deeply and spread them for a maximal inhalation.

To understand the importance of streamlining, try this test. Take a yard stick and plunge it into the water at an angle with the surface. Note the resistance. Now, place the ruler on its edge and feel how easily it slips into the water.

Sources: wikipedia.org/, britishfreediving.org/, freedive.net/, sarafreediver.com/

The Dangerous Puffer Fish

Recently, I'd talk about underwater Mexico which has many puffer fishes. So, the puffers are so cute and beautiful, some people like to feed them in aquarium because they can scalable their body when scaring, it look funny in the fish tank. The Puffer fish are the second most poisonous vertebrate in the world, the first being a Golden Poison Frog. The skin and certain internal organs of many tetraodontidae are highly toxic to humans. There unique and distinctive natural defenses are a compensation for their particular form of locomotion. Puffers use a combination of pectoral, dorsal, anal, and caudal fins for propulsion that make them highly maneuverable but very slow, and therefore comparatively easy targets for predators.



As a defense mechanism, puffers have the ability to inflate rapidly, filling their extremely elastic stomachs with water or air when outside the water until they are almost spherical in shape. Thus, a hungry predator stalking the puffers may suddenly find itself facing what seems to be a much larger fish and pause, giving the puffers an opportunity to retreat to safety. When lifted out of water there is a risk that puffers inflate with air. This may result in problems deflating again afterwards.

When this happens with aquarium specimens the recommended course of action for fishkeepers is to hold the puffer underwater by the tail, head upwards, and shake the fish gently until the air escapes out of the mouth. Some puffers also produce a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin in their internal organs, making them an unpleasant, possibly lethal, meal for any predatory fish that eats one. This neurotoxin is found primarily in the ovaries and liver, although smaller amounts exist in the intestines and skin, as well as trace amounts in muscle tissue and in its blood.

The puffer's poison is made by bacteria of the genus vibrio and may actually enter the fish by consuming prey that does possess the poison already. Most puffers are drab, many have bright colors and distinctive markings and make no attempt to hide from predators. This is likely an example of aposematism. As a result, they have the smallest known genomes yet found amongst the vertebrate animals, while containing a genetic repertoire very similar to other fish and thus comparable to vertebrates generally. Puffers are able to move their eyes independently, and many species can change the color or intensity of their patterns in response to environmental changes. In these respects they are somewhat similar to the terrestrial chameleon. Since these genomes are relatively compact it is relatively fast and inexpensive to compile their complete sequences.


Photo: sushifaq.com

Puffer's toxin evolved as a response to aquatic predators such as larger fish, rather than for use against humans. Note also, not all puffers are poisonous; Takifugu oblongus, for example, is one of the fugu puffers that is not poisonous. However, it should be noted that puffer's neurotoxin is not necessarily as toxic to other animals as it is to humans, and puffers are eaten routinely by some species of fish, such as lizardfish and tiger sharks. Puffer poisoning usually results from consumption of incorrectly prepared puffer soup, chiri or occasionally from raw puffer meat, sashimi fugu. While chiri is much more likely to cause death, sashimi fugu often causes intoxication, light-headedness, and numbness of the lips, and is often eaten for this reason.

Puffer's poisoning will cause deadening of the tongue and lips, dizziness and vomiting. These are followed by numbness and prickling over the body, rapid heart rate, decreased blood pressure and muscle paralysis. Death results from suffocation as diaphragm muscles are paralyzed. Patients who live longer than 24 hours are expected to survive, although the poison can cause comas lasting several days. Many people report being fully conscious during the entirety of the coma and can often remember everything that was said while they were supposedly unconscious. So, if you diving to found them, just keep away from them.

Source: wikipedia.org