Red Diving Hood

red fluoro

Addiction is a really bad thing, consuming you and hurting everyone around. Well, unless it is addiction of diving. If that’s the case you just become a happier person, come together with friends more often and enjoy and share awesome moments under water.

This weekend, I don’t remember why, we were not planning to dive. Woke up in the morning, planning to have a relaxing day. Next thing we knew we were driving to Peirce Island for a night dive with ever-dive-ready friend Dan.

We were dying to try the new Sola blue light we bought. There were a lot of reports out there about the tropical creatures glowing under UV/blue light, due to the fluorescent proteins these creature have. But there were no reports on the fluorescence of the New England waters. Were they non-existent. Is so why? What made some creatures to have this fluorescent protein (mostly green fluorescent protein, GFP)? And how did these properties expand to cold waters of northeast?

In tropical waters most corals and anemone fluoresce, as well as some shrimp, fish or some invertebrates like nudibranchs. If our nudibranchs fluoresce our best change is Peirce Island, where the nudis are huge and very picturesque. So, that’s why we hit the road.

Unfortunately, I found myself missing one BCD :/. My devastation was eliminated by Bert, who donated his BCD in expense of his enjoyment of underwater that day.  So this dive is dedicated to Bert!

I must say I enjoyed the night dive at this site more than the day dive. I found that it was so much easier to detect life around, with our focus compacted on the lighted area alone. Of course there were nudibranchs and lots and lots of egg ribbons. But tonight my focus was on the gunnels. I am so happy to see fish again. And I never expected to see so many. Both Dan and I saw many gunnels ranging from baby to pretty big ones. There were also many grubbies. I wonder if these guys came to munch on the egg ribbons the nudibranchs recently curated at this site? There must be something out there, which would love to eat these ribbons.

Not noticing how fast the time passed by with all the nudis and gunnels and the grubbies, we had hit the wall, hit the bottom of it and headed back. To our surprise the current started strong much earlier than we expected, so we really had to kick it with everything we had. Finally decided to surface and try swimming at the surface. It was a good decision, since it was much better at the surface. Though I lost a fin during all this crazy  kicking. One thing Dan mentioned that the flag he was carrying was really pulling him throughout the dive. So note to self: Do not take the flag with you at the Peirce Island, anchor it near the shore and let the boaters know there are divers down there.

About the fluorescence? Well, I did not observe and GFP down there, sadly reporting. The nudibranchs, frilled anemone or the northern cerianthids were also not glowing, I was really surprised by that. However, there is a lot of red fluorescence. The algae, the sea weeds had a deep red glow in them. My camera setup was not proper so I don’t have any photos of those. But I would like to try. One thing was cool to see, at the beam of the light I could see small red spherical creatures, glowing bright red. I am not done with fluoro diving yet. I ordered the necessary adjustments to be able to visualize them and photo them. Soon…

We had a little adrenaline rush, but left with the memories of an amazing diving at Peirce Island. Once again.