Cruising south through the archipelagos of rocky islands that fringe the mouths of the fjords, we made an unplanned stop this afternoon on the small island of Edoya. While the group went ashore to chat with the local residents and visit an historic church, I took a Zodiac to the southern tip of the island and dropped down into the dark, clear water with the digital video camera.
This region of the Norwegian coast is famed for its diving and after only a few minutes under the surface I could easily understand why. I dropped in above a dense kelp forest, yellow-brown blades waving in the gentle currents while small cod and rockfish played hide and seek among the trunk-like stipes. Descending past a steep wall, I found several wonderfully ugly Monkfish resting on the rock, waiting for the next unwary meal to wander by. I continued down unmolested, and at ninety-five feet, where the rock gave way to a sloping bottom of coarse sand, I discovered this large ray. A little over a meter long and beautifully marked, it was the first ray I have ever encountered in Scandinavian waters and also proved a very cooperative subject for filming.
Ascending back to the level of the kelp forest, I began to explore carefully while off-gassing some of the nitrogen I had accumulated in the depths. The blades of the kelp were thickly grown with Membranipora, or kelp lace, a colonial animal in the group called Bryozoa. It was these colonies which had attracted my interest, and after a bit of searching among them I was rewarded by finding this exquisite, tiny nudibranch also clinging to one of the blades. Only about a centimeter (less than half an inch) long, it is a shell-less marine snail and when I came upon it, it was feeding on the kelp lace, using specialized mouth parts to suck the nearly microscopic animals out of their homes in the colony. Nearby on the same blade of kelp, a minute shrimp wandered by, feeding on the algae and detritus that accumulate on the broad fronds.
As always, I was eager to return to the ship, to edit the footage I had shot and show it to the group on board. Making presentations like this is a lot like having a hundred dive buddies, eager to share the beauty and fascination of the marine world beneath the spectacular Norwegian fjords.
This region of the Norwegian coast is famed for its diving and after only a few minutes under the surface I could easily understand why. I dropped in above a dense kelp forest, yellow-brown blades waving in the gentle currents while small cod and rockfish played hide and seek among the trunk-like stipes. Descending past a steep wall, I found several wonderfully ugly Monkfish resting on the rock, waiting for the next unwary meal to wander by. I continued down unmolested, and at ninety-five feet, where the rock gave way to a sloping bottom of coarse sand, I discovered this large ray. A little over a meter long and beautifully marked, it was the first ray I have ever encountered in Scandinavian waters and also proved a very cooperative subject for filming.
Ascending back to the level of the kelp forest, I began to explore carefully while off-gassing some of the nitrogen I had accumulated in the depths. The blades of the kelp were thickly grown with Membranipora, or kelp lace, a colonial animal in the group called Bryozoa. It was these colonies which had attracted my interest, and after a bit of searching among them I was rewarded by finding this exquisite, tiny nudibranch also clinging to one of the blades. Only about a centimeter (less than half an inch) long, it is a shell-less marine snail and when I came upon it, it was feeding on the kelp lace, using specialized mouth parts to suck the nearly microscopic animals out of their homes in the colony. Nearby on the same blade of kelp, a minute shrimp wandered by, feeding on the algae and detritus that accumulate on the broad fronds.
As always, I was eager to return to the ship, to edit the footage I had shot and show it to the group on board. Making presentations like this is a lot like having a hundred dive buddies, eager to share the beauty and fascination of the marine world beneath the spectacular Norwegian fjords.
