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Photo from the Commonwealth |
My Trip to the Fiji Islands Introduction In June 2009, I spent a week with my colleague and friend, Ann Haber, on a live-aboard SCUBA diving boat in the Fiji Islands. This was a professional development opportunity for both of us, to enrich our knowledge and experience for teaching biology at Pima. What a wonderful, amazing, and thought-provoking trip we had! I kept a little diary of my trip, which I'm presenting here for all my Marine Biology students to read.
Yup, that's me underwater and in action! Photo courtesty of Jesse Fairbanks |
Day 1: Arriving in Fiji, Getting on the Boat, Going for our First Dive
| I can’t believe that I am actually here! My friend Ann (who teaches Anatomy and Physiology at Pima) and I peered out of the plane as it landed in Nadi, hoping to take photos of Fiji from the air but it was dark when we arrived at 5am. That confused me, because at this time of year (late spring) at home in Tucson, it is light by 4am. Then I remembered that here in Fiji, we are only 16-18 degrees south of the equator. Tucson is about 32 degrees north of the equator. Not only is it late fall here, but because we are so much closer to the equator (better put on some extra sunscreen!), there is not much difference in day and night length. And sure enough, when I ask, it gets light here at about 6am and it gets dark at around 6pm. |
Photo: Nan Schmidt |
Photo: Nan Schmidt |
Ann and I are here to spend a week on a live-aboard dive boat, making 3-5 SCUBA dives each day on Fiji’s coral reefs. Our boat is the NAI’A, which means dolphin in Hawaiian. NAI’A normally carries 18 passengers, but our trip is under-booked … there are only 8 divers. This means that I get my own stateroom (fancy boat word for “hotel room”) instead of bunking with Ann. NAI’A was built in 1979 and then completely redesigned in 1992 as a live-aboard dive boat. The staterooms are on the bottom level, the next level up has the dining room, galley (boat talk for “kitchen”), and a very large dive prep area. Above this level, there is a sun deck with the wheelhouse (another boat term—this is where the ship is piloted from and it has all of the ship’s instruments). |
Dive 1: Samu Reef, just W of Lautoka, on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji Our first dive in Fiji is a “check out dive” on a shallow (max 50 feet, but mostly at about 30 feet) patch coral reef, with small coral heads, some larger coral pinnacles, and sandy bottom between. I am a bit overwhelmed by all of the different types of coral I see and realize I’m going to have to do some serious studying to figure out what is what! I do see some signs that the coral here has bleached … the tips of many of the branches of the hard scleractinian corals are white due to loss of some of their zooxanthellae. Rather than try to remember and describe everything I see, I have decided to focus on a few critters from each dive I make. |
It's a little hard to see in the photo, but the tips of this hard coral have bleached white. Photo courtesty of Jesse Fairbanks |
Here's one of the beautiful orangish-yellow crinoids we saw. Photo from Nai'a |
On this dive, I am fascinated by the echinoderms (urchins, sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, and crinoids). Let’s start with the crinoids, because they are just bizarre. Crinoids also are called feather stars. They have a fossil record goes back 100s of millions of years and were dominant type of marine life 300-400 mya. Today they are fairly uncommon. Here on my first dive I see several species of crinoids. Each is about the size of a softball or large grapefruit, with long feathery arms on top. They feed by waving their arms in the current and snagging plankton. I would love to see them at night when they are mobile. They “walk” around on “feet,” (called cirri) which during the day grasp on to the coral reef and anchor them in one place. |
| Although I don’t see many sea stars on this first dive, the ones I do see are unforgettable because they are EXACTLY the same species of sea star (Linckia laevigata) that is common when I dive in the Gulf of California. For me, it is Déjà vu, all over again. Linkia laevigata comes in many colors, from bright blue to green, pink or even yellow-tan. The bright blue variety is particularly stunning and the first one I see on this dive. Interestingly, Linkia laevigata is found all over the Pacific: the Gulf of California …. over 5,000 miles away from Fiji, as well as the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. Looking at the guidebook, there are several sea stars that I recognized from the Gulf of California … Gomophia sp., Leiaster sp., Linckia multifora, Acanthaster planci, Protoreaster nodosus (chocolate chip sea star). |
Linckia laevigata in all its colorful glory. Photo from Hobart and William Smith |
Satellite photos of the Gulf of California Photo from NASA |
That reminds me that the Gulf of California, our closest marine environment to Tucson, is really unique because it has marine creatures from all over the globe. Not only does it have its share of global marine species (those that occur in all of the world’s oceans), but some of its marine critters are from the Caribbean—they date back to when the Isthmus of Panama was underwater and the Caribbean and Pacific oceans met at the Straights of Panama! Some of the marine critters are not surprisingly the same as other marine animals along the Pacific coast of Central America (after all that is the Gulf’s closest marine neighbor). Others are the same as or related to colder water organisms more common along the coast of California—these animals may have been stranded in the Gulf after the Baja Peninsula stopped being an island and melded to North America. And other marine species have their affinities with the central tropical Pacific Ocean—these are the ones I’m seeing in Fiji. And then about 16% of the macro marine invertebrates in the Gulf of California are endemic. That means they occur no where else. |
| Last on my list of echinoderms from this dive are some really neat sea cucumbers. The neatest one was Bhadschia graeffei. This species radically changes its appearance in its transition from juvenile to an adult. The juvenile mimics nudibranchs of the family Phyllidiidae. Once it grows bigger than the maximum size of the nudibranchs, it begins altering its appearance, as the mimicry is no longer effective. As an adult it is beige with black/brown spots and short, white tipped tubercles. It has dark brown tube feet that are long and look almost like little stilts upon which it walks around. |
This is a full-grown Bhadschia graeffei. Photo courtesty of Jesse Fairbanks |
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| http://dtc.pima.edu/blc/183/ |
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