As I grade exams, try and get over a cold, and contemplate some dreary weather I can think way back to last Saturday when I experienced a very different world.
First the preamble.
The Daily Bucket is a place where we post and exchange our observations about what is happening in the natural world in our neighborhood. Birds, blooms, bugs & more - each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
And then a teaser.
Note that all of these pictures were taken using the Underwater setting on my Canon G9. This was quite unnecessary and in fact counterproductive in a few inches of very clear water and is the reason all the photos have this rosy glow to them.
Fellow bucketeer and Panhandle denizen PHScott has written about the St. Joe Peninsula and St. Joe Bay before. It is a wonderful place and well worth visiting. Last Saturday I went snorkeling in the bay for the second time. This time we went with experienced people who took us to the right place and we actually saw some stuff.
The bay is very large and shallow and the bottom is a patchwork of open sand and sea grass beds. These beds are a highly productive ecosystem. They are characteristic of shallow water that is protected from violent wave action. There is a great diversity of life here although it takes a while to develop an eye for it.
Juvenile fish are among the most conspicuous animals in the sea grass
Probably the most common were these sea urchins. There were plenty of sand dollars as well, mostly buried in the sand.
This odd looking thing is a tunicate. It is actually a relatively close relative of the vertebrates. The larval form looks like a tadpole. The adult is a filter feeder that externally looks like a sponge.
These large pen shells were mostly buried in the sand with the shells slightly open at the top to filter feed. Some had been eaten by predators and other animals took up residence inside them. One of my friends showed my one with a toadfish inside but I wasn't able to get a clear picture. She told me she has seen octopus inside them.
There were also large numbers of these decorator crabs. Hermit crabs as well, usually in very shallow water.
The most striking (and a bit nerve-wracking) denizens of the area were these stingrays which I have tentatively identified as Atlantic Stingrays, Dasyatis sabina. Mostly they swam away when you approached but sometimes they just held still. The tide was extremely low and potentially you could pass right over one in water that was less than a foot deep.
They were fascinating to watch and I managed to escape unscathed.