Today, while the guests were bird-watching in a small reserve, snorkeling from a granite sand beach or exploring the shopping possibilities in Cabo San Lucas, I put on my dive gear and made a quick excursion down to 90 feet along the rocky wall of Land's End. Visibility was good and despite the whine of jetskis overhead, the underwater world was as serene as always and I encountered a marvelous variety of fish and other marine creatures. Overall, the dive was quite typical of my experiences beneath the Gulf of California, offering numbers of familiar common species and a few rarities and surprises. There were my old friends the King Angelfish, Barberfish and Sergeant Major, all in good numbers; I used our underwater video rig to film them grazing on the reef surface or gulping plankton in mid water. Nearby, I found a group of Panamic Soldierfish gathered under a ledge. In the lights of my camera they shone bright red, but when I turned off the artificial illumination they almost disappeared, appearing dull, dark gray in the absence of natural red wavelengths of light at that depth. I filmed them both ways in order to demonstrate the unusual manner in which red is a camouflaging color for reef fish. I was also able to capture good images of Moorish Idols and Scrawled Filefish, two rather tropical species that we almost never see further north in the gulf.
Most exciting of all was the most unusual aspect of the morning; throughout the dive, at every depth from the surface to 90 feet, I was surrounded by large Scyphozoan sea-jellies. This unidentified species, which I had never encountered before, averaged about a foot in diameter and swam fairly strongly, the deep purple edge of their bells smoothly contracting and flaring as they moved through the water. I enjoyed capturing their graceful motion on the video camera, and while shooting close-ups I discovered that several of them had tiny fish concealed in and around their feeding tentacles! These juvenile Driftfish (Psenes sp.) move with impunity among the stinging tentacles, protected from predators and feeding on leftover bits of the jelly's prey, a niche very similar to that of the clownfish which inhabit large anemones in the Indo-Pacific. Back on board the Sea Lion I edited the highlights of what I had shot and showed it to our guests, featuring both the behaviors of the common fish that they had seen while snorkeling and the rare encounter with the jellies and their Driftfish. It was a real treat to discover and share such an interesting and unusual pair of animals, present in the midst of old familiar friends.
