Coming up, Jonathan travels to the Philippines to hunt for a rare octopus in a muck diving
adventure!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
The ocean can be a very unforgiving place to live.
Every animal needs a strategy to survive—a way to catch food and a way to keep from becoming
food.
Different habitats require different strategies.
Some animals live in the open ocean.
Some live around coral reefs.
But one of the most fascinating habitats for cool critters is the sandy sea floor.
It seems like there should be nothing here, but in fact there are lots of really interesting
animals that have adapted to this unique environment.
Diving in these sandy, featureless domains has come to be known as muck diving—even
though there usually isn’t any actual muck.
I’m heading to the Philippines--known for muck diving.
One of the most popular mucky destinations is Dumaguete.
The muck of Dumaguete is also known to be one of the best places to find one of the
rarest and most exotic octopuses in the world—the Wonderpus.
Yes, it’s really called a Wonderpus.
I arrive at Atlantis Resort Dumaguete--situated right on the beach--with 5 days to find a
Wonderpus.
The “muck” that we’re diving in here in Dumaguete is actually just sand.
This sandy beach continues out into the shallows, and that forms the sea floor where all the
critters live.
But this sand isn’t ordinary sand.
It’s what they call black sand.
You can see it’s pretty dark in color.
It’s not really black, it’s really kind of more brown color, and it’s speckled with
little shiny minerals.
This is volcanic sand.
It comes from volcanic rock, so it looks a lot different from those white sandy beaches
in the Bahamas with the sugary-white sand.
Still, this is the ultimate muck-diving substrate.
My first stop is at the dive shop, to get my gear set up.
I’m not sure they have enough tanks to keep me going, but this ought to work for today.
Next, I board the boat for some muck diving adventures.
We only drive about 5 minutes from the dock.
John Ellerbrock, the guy who builds my awesome Gates housings is on the trip too, testing
out some new prototypes.
Then it’s time to suit up and go look for critters.
Cameraman Zach and I hit the water, grab our cameras and sink down only 25 feet to the
bottom.
It sure doesn’t look like much.
I find a crinoid, sometimes called a feather star.
This echinoderm is closely related to the sea star, but instead of a small number of
fat arms, this guy has dozens of thin arms covered in sticky projections to capture tiny
organisms from the water to eat.
Because the spiny, sticky crinoid is inedible to most organisms, a small fish--perfectly
camouflaged to match its host--lives within the safety of the crinoid’s arms.
Because most of the muck creatures are pretty small, my camera is set up with a special
lens for doing close-ups.
Each nudibranch (basically a colorful snail without a shell) is only an inch long.
As I move in a tad shallower, I come across an area of sea grass.
It’s easy to look at this and swim right over without a second glace.
But when you are muck diving you have to slow down and really look.
Camouflaged perfectly, a pair of Robust Ghost pipefish look just like the sea grass they
are hiding in.
They even sway like grass.
Nature doesn’t produce camouflage much better than this!
A few meters away, I notice my friend Howard Hall filming a clump of halimeda algae.
He must have something good.
Halimeda is a type of algae made of rigid, calcified segments that look like leaves.
This calcium makes the algae almost inedible to herbivores.
So pretty much nothing eats it.
The Halimeda ghost pipefish gains protection by looking like this inedible algae.
When it wanders away from its halimeda home, this tiny ghost pipefish stands out like a
sore thumb…but predators still think its just a piece of algae as it wiggles and flops
its way to its next hiding spot as a piece of drifting algae would.
Another halimeda, another fish.
Sea horses don’t like to swim much.
They prefer to hang on to things with their prehensile tail.
In this case, the halimeda provides a place to hang out, and wait for shrimp to come within
striking range.
By holding still, the sea horse allows the food to come to it.
Speaking of shrimp, there are clouds of them.
They’re barely larger than a grain of rice, but they feed many of the camouflaged hunters
of the muck.
Living in a burrow in the sand, a jawfish rarely needs to leave his home.
He watches for passing shrimp, and jumps out to grab them when they come close.
Few fish have perfected camouflage to the degree of the flounder.
While the flounder is actually lying on its side, in a bizarre twist of evolution, both
eyes are on one side of its body, so it can look around for food with both eyes from this
position.
The eyes are completely independent from each other like periscopes operated by two different
people!
On a small coral outcropping, a frogfish actually hunts for dinner by going fishing with a lure
attached to its head.
Frogfish, which resemble sponges for camouflage, are quite common around Dumaguete.
Anemones also manage to find a foothold out in the sand, usually attached to a rock.
And where there is an anemone, there are anemonefish, taking advantage of a safe place to live.
The anemone may look like a lush carpet, but every tentacle is covered in microscopic stinging
cells.
It will sting and eat soft-bodied animals like fish.
But not the anemonefish, which have a special slime on their skin which fools the anemone
into not stinging them.
The toxin of the anemone is so effective that it wards off moray eels, known as voracious
predators.
Frolicking only a foot from danger, the anemonefish seems unconcerned.
Another anemone looks more like a bath mat.
And it attracts a different species of anemonefish called the Saddleback.
This mated pair is engaged in raising some children.
The female has laid hundreds of eggs, attached to some rocks at the base of the anemone.
Then the male takes over, aerating the eggs every few seconds for 1-2 weeks.
In the anemonefish world, dads are the primary caregivers.
Each egg is the size of a grain of rice, and at this late stage of development, the embryonic
fish have beady little eyes visible through the egg cases.
I wonder if they can see their dad working so hard to bring them into the world?
The anemone has another inhabitant.
A porcelain crab also gets protection from the anemone.
It never needs to leave the anemone for food.
Instead the crab just hangs off the edge and catches plankton from the water with a pair
of appendages that look like baseball mitts.
While kneeling on the sand to film a pipefish, I have that feeling that I’m being watched.
Wouldn’t you know it, only a few feet away, a Wonderpus has poked its eyes out of a hole
to see what I’m up to.
It slowly emerges from its den in the sand.
It’s the weirdest, most incredible octopus!
And unlike other octopods which typically make their den under a rock or in a reef,
the Wonderpus only lives in the muck environment where it hunts, burrowing straight into the
sea floor.
The wonderpus tolerates my camera and lights as it slowly works its way across the sand
looking for something to eat.
Within seconds it changes from a brownish color to brightly striped.
This distinctive coloration is the easiest way to identify a Wonderpus.
And biologists have discovered that no two wonderpuses have the exact same spot pattern
on their body and head, so individuals can be identified in this way.
I watch as the octopus hunts for a few minutes, then it decides to burrow into a new spot.
It can drill its way into the soft sand in very little time.
It uses an arm to pull some loose substrate in closer to camouflage the position of the
den.
And then, the octopus vanishes.
Soon, it’s time to head back to the boat.
That was awesome!
Mission accomplished!
We found the Wonderpus!
Yes!
It didn’t do much, but it was still amazing to see.
Just one of the rarest octopuses in the world.
Really cool.
So my trip to Dumaguete is a huge success.
The more muck diving I do, the more I enjoy it.
I’m a critter nerd…I love to find the wild and weird animals that thrive in this
sandy habitat.
It’s another thing I love about exploring
the blue world!