Snorkeling San Andres: Urchins and Octopus

 Snorkeling the lagoon behind the reef at San Andrés can be summed up in one word: urchins. In one area, we saw dead urchins everywhere, and we wondered what might be going on. It seems, however, that that area was merely the graveyard, because on our next snorkel we saw more urchins (live!) than we’ve ever seen in one place, great aggregations of the spiny critters. It really was pretty amazing, but that’s not all there was. I spied a mantis shrimp, so called because of the resemblance of their sharp forelimbs to those of the preying mantis. They’re also known as ‘thumb splitters’ because they’ll use those aforementioned forelimbs to slice open your fingers if you grab them. Needless to say, we did no grabbing. To top it off, I spotted an octopus tucked down into the crevice of a rock. Our sightings were helped by the fact that the lagoon is shallow – only about 4-5 deep over much of the area – so we were up close and personal with the bottom dwellers.