First we talk about our night dive. The one other time that we saw bioluminescent ostracods was the night of July 28, 2010 around 45 minutes after sunset and 2 days after the full moon in front of the Bellafonte at a depth of about 30 ft (10 m). The ostracods are crustaceans and the bioluminescent display is associated with their matings which is phased with the moon. From what we read, the show starts roughly 45 min after sunset and lasts for a short time. When we first saw the display it lasted perhaps 15 minutes or so. We tried seeing the display on two other nights dives on subsequent trips but to no avail. On this trip we had mentioned to
Susan Porter that we'd look for the display and asked if she would like to join us. She had not seen this before and enthusiastically said yes. Linda and I felt some pressure to produce. Yesterday, Jan 19, was three days after the full moon. Yesterday's sunset was at 6:30 pm and by 7:00 pm the three of us were in the water in front of the Bellafonte. We finned out on the surface to where the reef starts and went down. At first we saw nothing and then, like someone flipped a switch, we were surrounded by these strings of flashing lights on all sides, top and bottom. They varies in length from 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm). The pressure was off. Linda and Susan high-fived each other soon after the "switch was flipped." The show lasted about 15 minutes and then we re-surfaced and fin back to the dock. We were all three pumped up. After putting away our equipment we went up to our apartment to sit around and talk about what we had just seen. WoW!
Linda did bring her Sony video camera (in a housing of course) but the camera was not sensitive enough. The human eye has much more dynamic range and what we saw was beautiful. This morning I used Adobe Illustrator to attempt recreating (very poorly) what we saw.
We did a morning dive at Bari's Reef and the current was pretty brisk but the visibility wasn't too bad. I was able to get close enough to a sandiver to take these photos. I especially like the head-on shot.
In anticipation of a night dive, we didn't dive in the afternoon but drove out to the east side of the island to look for birds and then drove to a spot along the shore north of Kralendijk and walked a short trail to take some photos. We saw parrots, wild donkeys (one of whom came up to Linda the Donkey Whisperer), wild goats and various flora. The flower is a hibiscus (thanks to Le Mai and Marie for the identification).
