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| Juvenile Puget Sound king crab |
Diving in the San Juans for fun is a real treat that doesn't happen too often for us. We decided to head out on the local charter dive boat for two dives in our backyard and, despite relatively crappy visibility, were treated to some fantastic critter sightings. The most exciting for me was this sweet juvenile Puget Sound king crab. I've done a fair amount (but not a lot) of dives in these islands and this little crab continued to hide from me until this dive. It was a great way to end our first dive off James Island.
There is another awesome crab in this photo - see if you can find it! It is called a
rhino crab and it was a coveted sighting when I used to work as a diver in Glacier Bay National Park. Well, these rad crabs hang in the state of Washington too and are sort of common if you know how to spot them!
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| Triopha catalinae (sea clown triopha) - or a really cool nudibranch |
This candy stripe shrimp,
Lebbeus grandimanus, is always fun to find. We know that they associate with this particular species of anemone
(Cribrinopsis fernaldi) so we were searching for
Lebbeus on purpose and found this big dude. Sometimes you can find an entire bunch of them on the anemone, but this huge one seemed to have control over the entire turf.
Both of our dives had great walls of anemones! We are in filter feeding heaven in the San Juans because the currents rip through these islands and deliver lunch to millions of invertebrate mouths. For the divers it just happens to be a gorgeous treat to find these walls of white but I think it means something even more to divers like us who are also biologists and appreciate what all those mouths mean to the ecosystem.
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| Jay |
The lovely sea cucumber is a filter feeder that tends to get less attention than its filter feeding friend the anemone. But the rocks on our second dive were covered in these tiny white sea cucumbers (with a sea urchin chillin' on top). Clearly the sea cucumber plays a massive ecological role as a filter feeder in this marine community, but alas when salmon are around who will study sea cucumbers? Me! Me! Me! If only there was funding for all those neat invertebrates....
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| Dirona albolineata (or another cool nudibranch) |
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| Some type of Dendrontus sp. Perhaps some of my dorky nudibranch loving friends can ID this to species? |
That is all for my dive stories....I just went diving again for work on Thursday in the same spot but found no juvenile Puget Sound king crabs. Boo! And I'll be diving tomorrow on a geoduck bed to scope out a spot before starting to survey the bed for a potential fishery. Exciting!
I lump all my photos by month, so you will have to scroll to the middle of the album to find the dive shots.
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