Over the weekend, a snorkel was in order! These are a few pictures. It has been very windy, so not great visibility but still nice. We are expecting a horrible coral bleaching this summer (January and February are the warmest months here in the Southern Hemisphere) from the El Nino weather pattern. Hopefully it will not be as bad as predicted… For now, it is good to enjoy the colors. We had a pretty bad bleaching last summer, but quite a bit of the coral was able to recover. Hard to predict whether the bleaching will be worse because they were recently stressed, or not as bad because they have had experience and can adapt… Let’s hope not as bad!
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- Butterfly fish and friends
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- Spotted sea cucumber
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- Everyone likes a blue starfish!
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- Large COT hiding in the reef
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- A large crown of thorns. The white area of coral is the damage that this COT has done.
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- Spotted box fish. They make me laugh with their tiny side fins…
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- Tim inspected a COT
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- Too bad they are poisonous and part of an outbreak, as they are very interesting creatures
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- Tim removing the COT. In large numbers, they are actually killed by injecting ox bile or another chemical, but we didn’t have any handy so had to just remove it from the sea.
(mis)adventures 