Capturing the Moment

A beautiful swallow tail slug Gloomy Nudibranch in the sand   Magic Island, Oahu   One exciting thing about exploring a new island is finding new wildlife. Even though Oahu is less than 100 miles away from Maui, there have been underwater wildlife sightings here that have never been seen in the waters off Maui. Almost all of the fish are the same, but what we are looking for can be a whole new ball game. Nudibranchs. In the definitive underwater invertebrate guide book, Hoover's "Hawaii's Sea Creatures, a Guide to Hawaii's Marine Invertebrates", many of the more rare nudibranchs were spotted here on Oahu. And many of those were found at Magic Island. So that is where we headed for our next exploratory Oahu dive. Leaf Scorpionfish Saddleback Butterflyfish   We started our dive in the Magic Island boat channel in about 5ft visibility. We have found this muck to be good nudibranch habitat in the past, but after finding only one gloomy nudibranch...

The new year has brought back the whales and funding for my research. So a few of us naturalist that crossover as researchers are back in action. Morgan and I have been going on getting more turtle ID photos for our catalog. On todays snorkel at Olowalu we came across many beautiful sea turtles and a couple of rarer finds. This reticulated butterflyfish is very rare to see around Maui. There was a pair but very timid and fast moving so this was the only semi good picture I could snap.   The blue swallowtail slug at the bottom is the second one I have seen but the first of this color variation. All of this along with the sounds of breaching whales not too far away makes for a pretty amazing laboratory.  Blue Swallowtail Slug