Tag: jellyfish
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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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Red-Eye Medusa Jellyfish
Finding a Red-Eye Medusa Jellyfish (Polyorchis pencillatus) on the El Rey wreck in San Diego, California.
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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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Photo of the Week: Black Sea Nettle Jellyfish on the USS Hogan Wreck
Regular readers are by now aware of my obsession with the black sea nettle jellyfish. I worked a dive charter a few weeks ago and spotted my first black sea nettle of the summer from the confines of the boat. It was all over–from that moment on, I lived and breathed black sea nettles. (Seriously:…
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The Purple-Striped Jellyfish/Sea Nettle (Chrysaora colorata)
There were ripping currents on the deep wrecks this past weekend, and with the currents came a whole slew of jellyfish and tunicates. I’m mildly obsessive about the Black Sea Nettle bloom we sometimes get in San Diego in the summers, and I’m well-known as a nudibranch zealot, so it should come as no surprise…
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Chamber Day 2013 and Catalina Kelp Diving
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013, marked the 25th annual Chamber Day on Catalina. The event benefits Catalina’s hyperbaric chamber, the only hyperbaric chamber in Southern California that is exclusively dedicated to the treatment of diving accidents. The Chamber, which is staffed 24/7/365 by volunteers, derives over half of its annual budget from Chamber Day proceeds. We…
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13 More Photos from Diving the Oil Rigs and the Wreck of the Olympic
Another dive trip to the oil rigs off Long Beach came and went recently, with the typical trifecta of sites: the wreck of the Olympic, the Eureka rig, and the Ellen-Elly twin rigs. The swell prediction leading up to the trip was not encouraging, and surface conditions the day of the trip did not bring…
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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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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…