Scuba Diving Vacations

Actually, Bob did the dive and I sat up top playing Captain. We had 5 or 6 mantas on the night dive on Thursday. It's been consistantly running about that many the last week or so. Water temperature has still been running in the 80 degree range.

I have a dive tomorrow morning, so this post will be a short one, time to hit the hay. I just wanted to get back in the habit of updating at least every 3 days or so.

Here's another picture of a Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus) from a night dive some time back. Here's a little factiod about them I don't think I've mentioned... I learned this back in my aquarium days. They really don't like each other. Actually, we do find them in mated pairs in the wild quite often, but if you randomly put two together in an aquarium they often will battle. I remember one customer of mine had bought one and then later picked up an Arrow crab, which is a long spindly crab from the tropical Atlantic and Carribean. They apparenlty don't like each other either. He said the crab took off the shrimp's primary claws... Later, when the shrimp molted and regained it's claws (after a molt, as soon as the exo-skeleton hardens up they're apparently good as new) it returned the favor and took a few legs off the crab. This apparently went back and forth for a couple of molts each until they apparenltly found a workable peace arrangement. The customer actually got quite a kick out of it, I never sold that combination again though.

That's it for now.

Steve