CAN SOMEBODY ID THIS?
Endless… endless… ever changing energetic mass of blue wetness. So much sky, such simple ingredients… at first. Then the sea beasts come. They are free to go wherever they want in this pelagic medium. Unless they are just floaters drifting by they have all the power to decide if they are seen. I am sure the actual amount of sea beasts we have rowed by is much higher than the following list, but here is a breakdown of what we have seen and can mostly identify so far:
- Swimmers
- Leatherback turtle: Almost five feet long, grey and green, and downright dinosaur in appearance. It looked like it was floundering until we stopped to watch. It did circles around the boat before hitting our rudder with a two-and-a-half foot flipper. [Did you know we have our very own Leatherback in the “Great Canadian Turtle Race?” We’ve already crossed paths…click for the turtle’s route]
Dolphins: Since the first huge super pod, they have come to visit at night, jumping around the bow, lighting up the water around the boat with jets of light from the bioluminescence.- Billfish of some kind: The only place I had seen this color was on a Portuguese man-o-war. Pink, impossibly bright neon pink shining through the water mid-afternoon. Markus spotted it first – the pink crescent and a dot swimming about the hull. It looked like some alien ray until we saw it was attached to the rest of a dark blue six-foot billfish.
- Leatherback turtle: Almost five feet long, grey and green, and downright dinosaur in appearance. It looked like it was floundering until we stopped to watch. It did circles around the boat before hitting our rudder with a two-and-a-half foot flipper. [Did you know we have our very own Leatherback in the “Great Canadian Turtle Race?” We’ve already crossed paths…click for the turtle’s route]
- Flyers
Flying Fish: I wrote on these earlier. Still amazing. Through the Cape Verde Islands they seemed to get bigger and would sometimes jump in schools of two dozen or more. I have seen a few take off since the last blog, and as they exit the water, their tail beats back and forth on the surface until they are fully airborne.- Birds: We see birds every day. Petrels, Terns, and now most of time time two skuas (we think we are still working on Bird ID). These small dark brown birds have a white stripe on the back of their wings and tiny needle like beaks. Every evening they dance around the boat riding the small micro thermals above each wave. Never stopping, sometimes splashing into the water to grab some unknown beast to keep up what looks like an endless flight.
- Bugs: Not many flying bugs out here. Deep sea is not really their environment. That being said, a few days ago a moth flitted about the boat, and today a monarch butterfly almost landed on the deck. I always wonder where they have been blown in from and if they will make it back to land
- Floaters
Portuguese Man-o-war: An opaque blue bladder with a ridge-like sail. The top of the sail is trimmed in neon pink. As a child of the eighties I don’t associate this color with something found in nature, and because of that it makes this beast that much more fantastic. It’s a symbiotic creature, and beneath the bladder are stinging tentacles that catch smaller animals (and extend more than 35ft below the surface!).
Salp: This little opaque tube looks like it has little flakes of cobalt on it. On one side is a tiny beating black ball – it’s heart. This looks like a jellyfish but it actually has a larval notochord that puts it in the same category as animals with a spine.
Goose-neck mussels: We row through tens of thousands of these, perhaps hundreds or millions. Each cluster has up to thirty of these beasts. They attach themselves to anything that floats with a long neck, and from there a small shell develops. Although I jumped in and wiped down the boat a week ago, ones as long as 1/2 an inch are already growing on the hull, and I will be wiping them off today.
- Unknown
- Large fish: Yesterday a long, skinny, five-foot fish followed our boat for several hours. It was just too far out of reach to get a good shot with the underwater camera. Perhaps we were the most interesting thing in this part of the sea.
- Small fish: Sitting on sea anchor a few nights ago, several teardrop-shaped silver fish about a foot long, jumped around the light of our boat, too far and not distinct enough for an ID.
- Glowing beast: Two nights ago as Adam and I rowed, I dropped the CTD probe into the water. Attached to the rig when I pulled it up was a glowing tube covered in nodules. In the light, it just looked off white; but at night it sparkled bright green. As we row through the night, flashes of light from some unknown disturbance light up parts of the water like tiny localized silent strikes of lightning. We can only imagine whats beneath the surface. (image at the top)