Alert Diver Category: Parting Shot

Smalltooth sawfish are critically endangered, making them exceedingly rare to encounter on dives in Florida. Some scientists believe sawfish face the greatest extinction risk of any family of marine animals.

A few white southern right whales are born each year, but this leucistic trait is not a permanent feature. Their coloration usually gives way to a lighter gray in adulthood, indicating they were white at birth and distinguishing them from the more common darker whales.

These small yet magnificent mollusks live in the open ocean and are at the mercy of wind, tide, and currents. As they float upside down just beneath the surface, their blue-striped bellies point upward while their metallic backs are counter-shaded when seen from below.

The common seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus) is anything but. Found only in Australia’s temperate coastal waters, this spectacular seahorse relative — also called the weedy seadragon — grows up to 18 inches long and is painted beautiful colors and whimsically festooned with teardrop-shaped skin flaps.

Like many octopuses, the female greater blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena lunulata) is a semelparous animal, which means she reproduces once and then dies. After she lays a clutch of eggs, she quits eating and wastes away while protecting her eggs, dying shortly after her eggs hatch.

While photographing the wrecks throughout the day, I noticed a few wobbegong sharks, but they were difficult to photograph as they rested under ledges or in sheltered spots.

Each year humpback whales migrate from their feeding grounds in the Southern Ocean to the Austral Islands, where they use the sheltered waters around Rurutu as a calving and nursing area. Observers there can document the whales’ natural behaviors with minimal disturbance.

SOUTHERN RIGHT WHALES spend a few months each year in Península Valdés, Argentina, to mate and nurse their calves. My whale encounter there was one of the most challenging I have experienced. It was also one of my most rewarding and memorable experiences.

UPON SURFACING, I heard a fellow diver ask, “How cute are those brooding anemones?” This observation piqued my interest because I’d never heard of this behavior despite a lifetime of […]

IN THE ADAMS RIVER IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, huge flows of sockeye salmon swim upstream to complete their life cycle, marked by the compelling need to return to their birthplace to […]