Tag Archives: navy pier

All Predators Are Super Scary

They come in all shapes and sizes. Below the Navy Pier (built by Americans here in Exmouth, to support the construction of the lovely VLF, aka Very Low Frequency, radio towers that you may see poking out of photos of the area), there are some big ones. The Big Friendly Grouper, rumored to have been desirous of chin rubs and head pats since the 1960s or so, is perhaps the most obvious of the large predators. Though he lives up to his name with regard to divers, the BFG could still suck down some pretty big fish if he so chose. The Wikipedia page for Queensland groupers, of which he is one, states that they consume a large variety of marine life including “large sharks and juvenile sea turtles.”

Yeah, I dunno. Large sharks? Whatever. We gave his giant green-gray dorsum a good pat on the sand near the pier and moved on- I’ll see if I can get some photos from my dive buddy, because at that point my poor little camera had sucked down a bit too much salt water.

Our next predator, though, was much more colorful, and just a bit smaller:IMG_1077

 

The photo’s not my best by any means, but these little colorful guys (Harlequin shrimp snacking on an unfortunate sea star) were tucked in among what appeared in low light to be gray-blue-green rocks, and I had to hang a bit upside-down and change my white balance to get it. Perhaps the shrimp don’t seem as intimidating as other predators I’ve mentioned on this blog, but that’s only because you don’t move solely on tube feet. To this sea star, they’re the scariest thing on six legs. 

My third and final predator for this post:IMG_1037

 

The greynurse shark (Carcharius taurus) is known to be non-aggressive… unless provoked. Happily nobody in our dive group was interested in provoking anyone or anything, and for the most part the little sharkies (2-3m, maybe 6-9 feet?) took very little notice of us at all. With the visibility under the pier, maybe 8-10 meters maximum, it was very easy for them to slip out of view, which was a bit disconcerting, but thrilling nonetheless. The most archetypal predator, lurking in the murky depths, gliding without effort through the jumbled wrecks of past and sunken human endeavors… You don’t notice until you get to see one up close, but they’re all fine-tuned muscle, tough cartilage, and suspicious eyes balanced and perfectly buoyant in the water. And you look at them, bubbles spewing from your regulator and pooling against the underside of the rusting beams over your head, bobbing up and down each time you breathe, hands shaking (from cold, of course) and bright plastic fin tips brushing the rubble below you, and you wonder how little soft pink humans ever got to think they were in charge of the world.

You Won’t See It Coming

About once a week, maybe more, I get an email from someone I know (relatives, friends), with a title something like “340 Things That Will Kill You In Australia Without You Knowing” or “54.3 Ways Australia Secretly Wants You Dead” or “How To Get a Job and Stop Being a Drain on Earth’s Resources” (wait crap that last one is unrelated). Anyways, there are apparently lots of poisonous things that want me dead on this continent, though so far they’ve been reluctant to go on the attack. Anyways, part of what freaks people out about Australia I guess is the number of things that are both poisonous and sneaky.

Enter the wobbegong- this Eucrossorhinus dasypogon is considered harmless (I’ll start you off easy) if unprovoked, but certainly startling to come upon. The Navy Pier at Exmouth (dive currently run by the Ningaloo Whale Shark and Dive Company, very fun crew, very cool dive!) hosted at least two different and fairly large wobbegongs, which was excellent- they’ve been on my list of cool fishes since I was a young Agent Red Squirrel, reading books about marine life under the covers late at night. It’s harmless to divers but looks sort of creepy- those white spots aren’t actually the eyes, though. Look closer:

IMG_1035

 

 

 

But only because you’re a human- if you were a fish, you wouldn’t want to get that close. That wide mouth creates a lot of suction, and technically that fluffy carpet there IS a shark.

More fun facts about the tasseled wobbegong- its fringe is made of skin, and in the other two species of wobbegongs doesn’t go all the way around the chin. That’s why this name (Eucrossorhinus dasypogon) translates to “well-fringed nose with shaggy beard.”

 

All right, now that you’re nice and comfy down there under the pier, keeping a close eye on where the beams and columns are relative to your head but making plenty of time to listen to the humpback whales singing in the distance and look at the schools of silvery fish drifting through the beams of light in the cloudy water, take a look just off to the north:

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Stonefish, like this Synanceia horrida (see, aren’t Latin names fun?) can kill a grown man with one stab of their venomous and invisible spines. Happily, I’m no grown man and can therefore get a lot closer in… just kidding, Mom. We kept our distance and used the zoom on our cameras, but I was terribly impressed by our dive guide, Wes (who is moving to London and had a touching farewell with another lovely friend under the pier, who I’ll tell you more about later) for spotting this guy in the first place. Even pointed out, photo-enhanced and zoomed in, the fish still looks like nothing much. That was the part of the dive when I was happy that all of my various dive instructors and buddies and wise old advisors had taught me to keep my arms in close, away from stingy and bitey hidden bottom-dwellers.

I love diving- even without my favorite dive buddy, I had a happy and safe (though a bit chilly) time under the man-made and ocean-encrusted pier that we see so often from our transects. Warning to photographers, though- don’t take your favorite camera, even in a fancy and expensive housing, underwater with you unless you’re very cavalier or very insured, as my little old faithful G11 has now probably closed its little lens for the last time. But so it goes. If it could think, I hope it would have enjoyed the quality of light down there under the concrete and coral, and the sleep of electronic death. I hope it dreams of nurse sharks and giant groupers, mantis shrimp and harlequin shrimp and hundreds of nudibranchs. I hope it remembers Nepal and India, Little Cayman, Costa Rica, New Hampshire, and California. And I hope it remembers Australia fondly, less in listicles of violent and painful deaths and more in images of red dirt and teal water.

 

Goodnight from a sleepy Agent Red Squirrel- we’ll be on the boat at 7 am tomorrow, dodging the migrating humpbacks and searching for some more Sousa, as we do. From the boat, I’ll salute my new pier friends below the waves and try not to yawn too much before morning tea.