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SCUBA News 50~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011) Issue 50 - June 2004 http://www.scubatravel.co.uk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Welcome to the 50th edition of SCUBA News. We hope you enjoy it whether you've been with us for 50 issues or or just this one. If you have any suggestions for the newsletter or the web site, or want to tell us about a diving destination or dive operator, then either e-mail news@scubatravel.co.uk or fill in the form at http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/recommend.html Should you wish to cancel your subscription you can do so at http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/news.html Contents: - What's new at SCUBA Travel? - Letters - Palau - the best diving in the world? - Creature of the Month: Soft Coral - Diving News from Around the World __________________________________________________________ What's New at SCUBA Travel? =========================== Photo Gallery For Wreck divers: new photos of the Fenella Ann, a scallop trawler that sank off the Isle of Man in November 2002. If you prefer warm water marine life then see our page of clownfish photos. These attractive little fish were the subject of our "Creature of the Month" feature in June last year. We now have a page dedicated to their picturess, mostly taken in the Egyptian Red Sea. Finally, there are more photos in our Red Sea Coral room. Wreck - http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/photo4.html Clownfish - http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/photoclown.html Coral - http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/photo5.html Diving Destinations - UAE, Bonaire, Egypt and the Coral Sea Snoopy Island, in the United Arab Emirates is perfect for a relaxing weekend break to get away from the hubub of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Bonaire is good, but not as good as some Pacific Regions or the Red Sea (seahorses apart). The little known Soma Bay (Red Sea) has fine corals and few divers, and there's world class diving in the Coral Sea (Australia). For details see http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/scuba.html#UAE http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/scuba.html#Bonaire http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/africa.html#Egypt http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/australia/ :ADV_____________________________________________________ Automatically count the customers entering your dive shop - by the day, by the hour, by the week - you choose. Use any Windows program for analysis and decision making. For more details see... http://www.videoturnstile.com/ ____________________________________________________ADV: New Thailand Diving Centre Listings For operators in Pattaya, Phuket and Koh Phi Phi see http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/thailand/thaiop.html __________________________________________________________ Your Letters ============ I've found a fantastic service which I thought the rest of the diving fraternity might find useful! I was struggling to find a battery for my Suunto Solution dive computer and didn't have time to send it away to be fitted. I ordered through www.Watch Battery.co.uk and the battery arrived the next day. Saves a fortune in time and money. This chap's web site also helps with fitting advice: http://www.devilgas.com/old/suunto_bat_change/ Andrew Reay-Robinson __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Palau: The Best Diving in the World? ==================================== Palau (or Belau) is a 100-mile long archipelago, southeast of the Philippines. It's diving features sea walls, sheer drop-offs, caves and an exuberance of marine life. Blue Corner Wall, German Channel and Peleliu Express are deservedly world famous dive sites. Palau has the best diving I've seen anywhere in the world, both on variety of dive sites and the large amount of marine life. It is particularly good for sharks. I haven't dived the Galapagos, but I gather the two spots are comparable. Blue Corner Wall definitely deserves to be near the top of any Top 10 Dives list. Hook in your reef hook and watch the action, with grey reef sharks by the dozen, white tips, dogtooth tuna, king mackrel, barracuda, giant jacks, black jacks, even a silvertip shark if you're lucky. Peleliu Express is less well-known than Blue Corner but equally exciting. It is infrequently dived because it is further to the south of Palau, and many dive operators don't want to take the time or use the gas to get there. But the current will push you along a sloping wall at about 25 metres. You can hook on with a reef hook at the corner, much like Blue Corner. On our dive, we saw a nurse shark, plenty of grey reef sharks, a huge dogtooth tuna, small barracuda and a giant hammerhead, which the grey reef sharks mobbed to chase it away. Amazing. There is a ban on fishing for sharks in Palau (though the sad sight of a few sharks with a hook and line streaming from their mouth showed it still happens). Still, this leaves Palau with large numbers of grey reef sharks, as well as a variety of other big critters. In a week, we saw the following, in no particular order: 6 mantas that we snorkelled with, a giant hammerhead, a silvertip shark, possibly a young bull shark, grey reef sharks on basically every dive, white tip sharks, black tip sharks, a nurse shark, a leopard shark, 2 marble blotched rays, 2 eagle rays, a feather-tailed ray, an octopus, chevron barracuda, yellow-fin barracuda, turtles, pleurobranchs, lobsters... The underwater life of Palau is the best that I've seen anywhere in the world, outdoing Bali, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, the Bahamas... by Alex McMillan Further Reading: Diving and Snorkeling Palau, Lonely Planet, 2000 Available with 30% off from Amazon.co.uk at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/asin/1864500190/1286 and from Amazon.com __________________________________________________________ Creature of the Month: Soft Coral, Dendronephthya ================================================== Corals belong to a group of animals called Cnidarians. This includes hard and soft corals, sea fans, gorgonians, jelly fish and sea anemones. A single coral animal is a polyp - that bit with the flowery tentacles. Soft corals are actually colonies of animals, each connected to its neighbour by living tissues. Colonies tend to contract during the daytime and expand at night. Soft corals are not reef-building, although they do secrete limestone. In their case this is as internal crystals called sclerites or spicules. These are often brightly coloured contributing to the coral's beauty. Because soft corals do not have large skeletons, they grow faster than hard corals Eight feathery tentacles surround the coral polyp's mouth and whip food into it. They filter-feed: removing plankton from water flowing around the colony. Recent research on soft corals indicates that they are herbivorous, feeding on single-celled planktonic particles. Previously they were thought to be carnivores and feed on crustacean larvae. It is difficult to identify individual Dendronephthya species but two common ones are D. hemprichi and D. klunzingeri. D. klunzingeri has clusters of 6 to 8 polyps, red spicules and is a purply-colour. The corals can reproduce asexually. Species of Dendronephthya drop little bundles of 5 - 10 polyps, which sink to the bottom and in a couple of days attach by growing root-like structures. During sexual reproduction, female colonies spawn repeatedly for several successive nights. This is an exception to the generalization that free-spawning reef-corals have brief and synchronized broadcast-spawning episodes. The Dendronephyta genus includes some of the loveliest soft corals. They are found throughout the Indo-Pacific and are particularly common in the Red Sea. For photographs see... http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/coral.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral3.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral4.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/daedsoftcoral.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral1314.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral138.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral.html http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/softcoral1311.html Further Reading The Blue Planet, by Alastair Fothergill, Martha Holmes, Sir David Attenborough, BBC Consumer Publishing, 2001, ISBN 056-33-8498-0 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0563384980/1286 The Red Sea in Egypt, Part II, Invertebrates by Farid S Atiya, Elias Modern Printing House, 1994, ISBN 977-00-6697-4 M. Dahan and Y. Benayahu. Clonal propagation by the azooxanthellate octocoral Dendronephthya hemprichi. Coral Reefs 16(1): 5-12; 1997 http://springerlink.metapress.com/app/home/ M. Dahan and Y. Benayahu. Reproduction of Dendronephthya hemprichi (Cnidaria: Octocorallia): year-round spawning in an azooxanthellate soft coral. Marine Biology 129(4): 573-579; 1997 http://www.springerlink.com/app/home/ Australian Institute of Marine Science http://www.aims.gov.au/ __________________________________________________________ Diving News From Around the World ================================= DIVE CENTRES TO LEAVE SIPADAN Local government recently issued an order for the removal of all man-made structures on Sipadan by year-end to protect the environment. A Minister said over-development of the island for more than a decade had created piles of rubbish and noise pollution. Dive operators are having to relocate their operations to nearby islands and the mainland to enable them to continue taking divers to Sipadan on day-trips. http://www.dailyexpress.com.my/news.cfm?NewsID=27267 SCIENTISTS PREDICT PANIC ATTACKS IN DIVERS There is evidence that the principal cause of decompression illness and fatalities in divers is rapid ascent, and it appears that the primary stimulus for rapid ascent is panic. A recent American study investigated whether panic behaviour could be predicted in people learning to dive, and found that 83% of predictions were accurate. http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/medline/pmid;15162252 SEA PROTECTION COSTS LESS THAN FISH SUBSIDIES Protecting the world's oceans will cost governments far less than the amount they spend on subsidies for fishing fleets and will lead to bigger catches in the long run, according to a new study. http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-15/s_24883.asp SOLOMON ISLANDS ONE OF MOST DIVERSE CORAL REEF SYSTEM IN WORLD Scientists have recorded 485 species of coral and 284 species of fish on a reef in the Solomon Islands. These numbers include 9 new species of coral and 2 new species of fish. The surveyed area had the second highest number of coral species in the world after the Raja Ampat Islands in Indonesia. The area also ranked with the top five for fish diversity - on a par with Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and Papua New Guinea. The reason given for such a diversity of both coral and fish species was the complexity of the habitat including exposed reefs and sheltered lagoons. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-06/23/ :ADV_____________________________________________________ Save money on a vast selection of posters and prints: whales, sharks, dolphins, seascapes... Browse the offers at www.allposters.com Subscribe To SCUBA NewsOur newsletter, SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011), is absolutely free. It is a monthly publication, delivered by e-mail. To receive your copy fill in your details below. We will never pass your e-mail address to any third parties, or send you unsolicited e-mail. You will receive an e-mail confirming your subscription. If you don't receive this you have probably entered your e-mail address incorrectly - revisit this page and re-subscribe. Send us your Press Releases
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ENVIRONMENTAISTS ANGRY AT BARRIER REEF OIL CONCESSIONS
Australia has increased tax concessions to encourage
oil exploration in the far reaches of the Great Barrier
Reef, angering environmentalists who warn an oil spill
could destroy the world's largest living reef system.