February 22, 2010
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still stalling
I’m still sorting photos and catching up on work and errands, so here are a few more pictures from the trip for now.
Nudibranchs are amazing. They are usually pretty small (these were all somewhere between one and two inches), but they are gorgeous. If land slugs were as beautiful as sea slugs, people would probably spend less time and energy being grossed out by them.
They are small, slow, pretty much blind, and they live on coral reefs that are huge even on the human scale.
(Well, they’re mostly small. This guy was probably over 18 inches long):
They also come in seemingly infinite variations of species, and aren’t all that common, so it is baffling how they manage to find each other without the benefits of the internet and online dating. These two found each other and engaged in enthusiastic sea slug sex:
This one was a few inches away, and ran away as quickly as his nonexistent legs would take him:
I took the last three pictures on a night dive in Palau, which, incidentally, was a beautiful dive — the water was empty of divers other than our group of four, we had some lovely swim-throughs and a space inside the reef that Superman described as a coral cathedral. Kanga was fascinated by a disco clam. A turtle circled us for a while. It was everything I could ask for from a night dive.
The best part, however, and one of the highlights of the whole trip (for me) was coming up out of the water and floating on the surface, surrounded by quiet water, and looking up. There is hardly anything out there, so there is very little light pollution. I have never seen so many stars in my life. There were so many stars that it was hard to find constellations. Even Orion, who usually sticks out like a sore thumb, was lost in a sea of stars.
We got in the boat and had a 30 minute ride back to the dock, and for most of the ride, I stuck my head out of the boat and alternated between looking up at the stars, inadequately described above, and peering down at the water, where the boat’s engines were churning up phosphorescent plankton, which filled the water with tiny little pinpricks of light. It was such an unbelievably beautiful experience, and I tried so hard to memorize every detail of it, because I’m not sure if I’ll ever see anything that beautiful again, but if I do, I want to be able to compare and catalog the two experiences side by side in my mind.
Comments (5)
i love your blogs.
awesome pictures!
more updates, please.
and book recommendations:P i’m on #2!
oh, that’s such a beautiful experience. even when i’d go swimming in the ocean at night, the only thing that i could see was the moon. although that in itself is beautiful while floating in quiet water, it pales in comparison to what you saw.
i wonder, is the biolight in the ocean that bright? it truly must be beautiful and the presence of stars must have just created such a sacred atmosphere.
i’m really glad you experienced this. just thinking about it right now and imagining it humbles me.
@ThePrince - The plankton is very bright when it’s fluorescing, and neon green, so it’s like a little plankton rave in the boat’s wake. We turned off all the lights on the boat, so that all we could see was starlight and plankton-light (there was no moon that night). We had seen the stars the night before, Milky Way from horizon to horizon, so I knew before the dive that coming out of the water was going to be incredible, and even knowing that, it still exceeded expectations.
@isuperlovedogs - You can always follow along on what I’ve been reading based on what shows up on my blogs under “Now Reading”