Before anything else, a word about all the fantastic people working in the diving industry. All the photos in this post have been shot in the Lembeh Strait – North Sulawesi – Indonesia; Anilao in the Philippines and Nuweiba – Golf of Aqaba – South Sinai – Egypt.
Sonja would never have been able to grow as an underwater macro photographer the way she did without the expert advice of underwater photo professional and trusted dive buddy Alex Tyrrell Dive4Photos or to find all these marvelous and colorful underwater creatures without the help of all the unbelievably skillful guides at Zee & Simon Buxton’s place NAD LEMBEH; or the team of Mike Bartick in his CRYSTAL BLUE RESORT in Anilao and Hamdi Kassem and his son Islam Hamdi from AFRICAN DIVERS NUWEIBA. All these great people are suffering right now as their businesses nose-dived last year and are in survival mode ever since because of the Corona pandemic. Please don’t let them down now, support them financially whenever you can. And book new and exiting dive expeditions with them as soon as it is possible again. May the vaccine be with you !
I suppose all of you know the fantastic novel of Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ? A league in most English speaking countries is about 4.83 km. So 20,000 leagues would be s = \sqrt{\frac{1}{N-1} \sum_{i=1}^N (x_i – \overline{x})^2} eeeeuuh well… deep….
We started exploring the underwater world many years ago but of course we only rarely go beyond 40 m below the surface! What is sure is that of all living space on our planet 99 % is under water. And mankind has explored about 5 % of it. We quite literally only scratched the surface. So it’s very inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it’s clearly planet Ocean…And we’re spending gazillions of tax-payers’ Euros to built rockets so we can travel 54,6 million kilometers to Mars while all we’ve come up with to explore the vastness of the ocean is basically a 5 $ plastic snorkel.
We’re exploring new worlds and other planets – looking for other civilizations before we even had a look over our own garden fence. The world is full of people who will climb mountains hopping on one leg and blindfolded or cross the Sahara desert walking backwards while listening to a Celine Dion song (I don’t know which one is worse the desert or the Dion song). But ask them to check out what is under the surface of the sea and all you’ll get is “does that water go all the way down to the bottom?” or “oooh I might get my hair wet”
But unless you are one of those explorers who only boldly go where everyone’s gone before and if you truly want to go where there are no queues, no spoiled rotten whining kids (I love Shark Week, where all kids under 12 swim for free), no nagging mother in laws, no smartphone zombie apocalypse, no religious nut jobs threatening to blow themselves up to get laid in muslim paradise, where you even get away from the eco-terrorists-gestapo lambasting you for driving anything else than a family-sized cargo bike…the only place to go is under the waves. It is estimated that today we know about 200,000 marine species. It is a mystery to any scientist how many species are still out there to be discovered in the depths of the oceans. An incredible number still remain to be discovered and has never even been encountered by humans at all. Every year, almost 2,000 marine species new to science are added. Scientists have found over 6,000 new marine crustaceans and almost 8,000 marine molluscs just in the past ten years.
And most of these species are “macro” sized (1 mm to 10 cm) seabed-living creatures – right up my diving alley and that of my macro photography crazed wife! Given those numbers you might also understand better our fascination with this underwater macro world. A world only a very small number of you land-dwelling humans will ever see up close. Even most of our fellow scuba divers will never ever even notice or see these tiny creatures and will just paddle by blissfully unaware in their brightly colored wet-suits, happily blowing bubbles towards the surface. But not us. We get down and dirty. We dive into the muck. We patiently lie in wait for hours, hardly breathing, in front of this tiny coral head where we suspect an even tinier Alvin the Goby might be living with his best mate Freddy the Shrimp…
The rewards of our commitment to the world of the small – smaller – smallest, are so huge! Just enjoy with me some of the marvelous creatures we were allowed to admire and got up close and personal with over the past few years and in the course of our about 1,000 dives and countless hours underwater. Strange sea animals that will interest and inspire you. Cool and bizarre sea creatures, breathtaking natural wonders that look like they’d be more at home in a science fiction movie than in the depths just off the beach where you spent your summer vacation. These stunning underwater creatures offer an ethereal beauty hard to reproduce on land. Have a look at them here through the eye of the lens of Sonja…and if you want to see more, visit her WEBSITE.
I started this post with a reference to Jules Verne and will end with a quote from him: “The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. ”
