Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 7

67. A Small Curiosity, Imperfectly Photographed

Last week I went for a dive at Fairlight. A little way inside Sydney Harbour, this is not a highly regarded dive site; it can be rough and murky and unrewarding. But occasionally the conditions align. With the wind and any swell from the north, a morning high tide and a bit of unknowable microbial alchemy, it becomes a place of unusual beauty, right there inside a working harbour. Fairlight colors are muted mauves and yellows. (An old post described the site on the clearest day I’ve seen.) P...

66. Visitors

Last weekend I went out with some friends to our favorite octopus sites, just to check in. The octopuses were fine, but the most interesting aspect of the dives was seeing some other visitors. The fur seal above came zooming in suddenly, somersaulting around and peering at us 50 feet down – “what are you guys here for?”

The seal showed off its excellent flippers…

 … and then was gone.

I think it was an Australian Fur Seal (though I know very little about seals). It was a large animal, quite...

65. Blue Water, Mating Season

This has been a good year for giant cuttlefish at the Cabbage Tree Bay Marine Reserve, on the edge of Sydney. Animals have been coming and going since the beginning of the year, including some spectacular ones. A few weeks ago I came back from a European trip to find the water bright blue and cuttlefish everywhere.

These photos were taken using my snorkeling camera, an Olympus TG4, not the Canon I use diving. The colors are basically straight out of the camera – turned down a touch in so...

64. Westward

This is another photographic post, from a trip last month to Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. The photos are from a dive day at the Muiron Islands. We’d come out west to see some large animals, but this post will feature smaller ones.

First, a trio of nudibranchs. The one below, I am pretty sure, has the appropriate name Chromodoris westraliensis. (‘Pretty sure? Why don’t you just check?’)

The next is from a notoriously difficult group. It might be what nudibranch sage Bill Rudman has c...

63. Octopuses Did Not Come From Space

A few months ago a paper appeared online that argued, among other things, that octopuses might have arrived from space several hundred million years ago as frozen eggs, carried by a meteorite. The paper has 33 authors and is in press in a journal called Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Much of the article is concerned with an older idea that all life on Earth might have been seeded from space, but it is the octopus claim that has been picked up by the media. Several news stories...

62. Hydra and Hydroid

The purple beast, perhaps 5 or 7 mm long, is Flabellina rubrolineata, a nudibranch. It reminds me of the mythical Hydra. This post is photographic, breaking up some wordy and weightier ones about Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. In the photos below, the mythical Hydra will feast upon a non-mythical Hydroid.*

First, seize your hydroid.

A hydroid of this kind looks like a flower on a long stalk, but it is an animal – a cnidarian, related to corals and jellyfish.

The flabellina wraps its...

61. Somewhere Between a Shrimp and an Oyster

Above is a Banded Coral Shrimp, Stenopus hispidis, in one of several hundred flawed photos I’ve taken of this species over recent months. I’ve become interested in these animals and want to get a good shot, but part of what makes them interesting makes them hard to photograph. They are very active, with arms and feelers moving continually, so a fast shutter is needed. But those arms and feelers extend through space, forward and back; they very much occupy their dens, filling them with append...

60. A Long Waltz With Cephalopods

The text of this post was written for the Waterstones Book Blog. Other Minds is Waterstones non-fiction book of the month for March 2018.

A week ago, in the late afternoon, I got into the water at a site I’ve dived hundreds of times now – Cabbage Tree Bay, just north of Sydney. The conditions looked OK from up top, but there was a strong surge below, with volumes of water chugging steadily in and out, carried by a cyclone swell coming in from the Pacific. Everyone down there was collected to...

59. Skeletons

After my accidental introduction to skeleton shrimp, I went back to Nelson Bay to look for them – to look for something I can hardly see, except as a translucent scrap. My approach was to look for motion at the right scale – they move a lot, in an vigorous bobbing manner – take some photos, and later see how I did. The surprise that came out of this is that skeleton shrimp were just about everywhere, on those dives. Once I found one in a photo, I’d find others lurking around it –crouching, i...

58. In a Bryozoan

A few years ago I headed a post with a photo by David Liittschwager, showing all the life teeming in a tiny scoop of sea water. I was reminded of the shot during some time spent recently with the object above, which is a bryozoan colony. I looked at it initially because Tom Davis, a biologist who was showing me around part of the Fly Point dive site in Nelson Bay, picked it out to me. On its stems were tiny sea slugs, each no more than a couple of millimeters long. (Tom has evidently had mic...