Update on the Awesome Stinging Cauliflower Jellyfish

Be amazed at the complexity of the stinging cauliflower jellyfish

I previously did a blog post on the stinging cauliflower jellyfish, a species we saw in Bocas del Toro. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera when we first saw it, so there were no pics of this incredible creature. However, last winter, out in the dinghy at Tierra Oscura area, we encountered dozens of the huge jellyfish-eating jellyfish. I took these photos by sticking my underwater camera over the side of the dinghy. There was no way I was going in the water with these beasts!Consider that the bell portion of the jellyfish is about the size of a basket ball, and those tentacles extend forever below.

Those fish are not caught, but swimming amongst the tentacles

Just a beautiful image of the bell as it pulsates

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.

Return of the Sea Cucumber

Three-rowed sea cucumber

Is more than one donkey dung sea cucumber a shitload?

I’ve blogged about sea cucumbers before, but they’re just so darn photogenic, and I’ve never seen so many in one place as in Bocas del Toro, so here we go again. Basically, a sea cucumber is a squishy tube of flesh – mouth at one end, anus at the other – that roams the sea floor. Not all roam; at least one species burrows and feeds by extending tentacles above the sand. Generally we’d spot them here and there, but in Bocas waters they’re everywhere – here, and there, and over there, and there, too… You get it. Here are a few we’ve encountered lately.

Conical sea cucumber

Hidden sea cucumber - the body is beneath the sand, and it's feeding with these exposed tentacles

The Elusive Ostrich-Shark

Nurse sharks often tuck up beneath coral heads and rocks, but this particular one apparently decided that if it couldn’t see us, then we couldn’t see it.