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Curious fish
March 9th, 2008
Filed under Ramblings
T and I are just back from the Maldives, where we were lucky enough to do lots of snorkelling around the reefs near our hotel. T’s snorkelling style is very natural – he takes a look around, absorbing the sights and appreciating the natural world for what it is. I, on the other hand, am not happy unless I know precisely what I’m enjoying. For me, looking without understanding just isn’t any fun – I need to tag and catalog! For snorkelling this year, that required an underwater digital camera, taking hundreds of underwater photos and buying two books of Maldivian fish so that I could identify what I’d seen in the evening. (A very small selection can be seen here on my flickr account.)
(We demonstrate much the same mindset when it comes to museums and paintings – I’m the one with the guidebook and the audio headset trying to understand the history and the significance, whereas T gets swept up by the aesthetic beauty of it all. I’d like to have a bit more of that emotional immediacy.)
However, there are some experiences that snap me out of the nerdy mindset and back to reality. Last year, it was a pair of butterflyfish that lived just outside our water bungalow, and that came right up to us to nibble our arms and hands every time we swam past. This year, it was a long thin sort of fish with a huge long mouth hanging around at the same depth as us lumbering snorkellers (a flutefish I think). This little guy seemed really curious, breaking away from his shoal to follow us up the reef, swimming around us and taking a really good, side-on look at us.
We also saw a turtle munching on the coral about 4 feet below us and then breaking off, as after a really good meal, to drift to the surface and take a few good breaths with a wide open mouth. Every time his head came above water, we bobbed our heads out too to see the turtle, briefly, in our above-water world. Then he dived nearly vertically down again and we lost him in the blue.
Tagged as: fish, maldives, snorkelling, turtle
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