Tag: salp
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Photo of the Week: Cyclosalpa affinis
DID YOU KNOW that the salp, while it looks like a jellyfish, is actually a tunicate, a member of the phylum Chordata, and is more closely related to vertebrates than it is to jellies?
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Throwback Thursday: Salps, Underwater Poetry, and My First Technical Dive
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When dives give you decompression, write haiku.
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Tech Diving Catalina Island and the California Oil Rigs
Southern California Tech Diving with Ocean Research Group This past weekend, I attended my first Ocean Research Group technical dive trip on the Sand Dollar out to Catalina Island, California. As a fledgling SoCal tech diver, it was pretty cool to do some “big kid” deep dives under the guidance of experienced divers and instructors. I’m also…
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Operation: Black Sea Nettle is a success!
One of my (many) favorite things about scuba diving in San Diego is the constant turnover of animal populations. I’ve lived and dove here for less than a year, and already I’ve been witness to the market squid run and the bat ray invasion. I was there when the juvenile rockfish moved in at La Jolla Shores,…
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An Uncommon Dive at La Jolla Shores
Friday morning, I went for one last cold-water dive at La Jolla before heading out of town for the Long Beach Scuba Show and our anniversary trip to Belize. With the possible exception of last year’s squid run, this was one of the most different and interesting La Jolla Shores dives I’ve ever done. In…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 3
(See Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1 and Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 2) Above is a male sheephead, a common game fish in California, and below are a pair of females. Fun fact: all sheephead are born female, and eventually change to males later in life. Here’s a Lingcod: A scorpionfish:…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 2
(See Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1 here.) This is the Spanish Shawl, a nudibranch (type of sea slug) common to Southern California. It’s tiny, only about one or two inches long. The orange appendages on its back are called cerata, which assist both in respiration and in digestion. They also store the stinging…
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Diving the California Oil Rigs, Part 1
(This is a continuation of my previous post on the California oil rigs.) The platforms are formidable structures both above and below the water. The water was green and murky at the rigs this weekend, with visibility in the 15-foot range. The vis did start to open up below about 100 feet (our maximum depths…