Just certified Koh Tao Open Water divers!

Koh Tao Diving Certification

4 more happy faces, 3 of them certified as PADI Open Water Divers today but 1 had trouble with their ears... so is to be continued tomorrow........!

For the rest of it was a lucky draw to be diving Chumpon Pinnacle on their PADI open water course... great Koh Tao diving conditions and lots to see!

Congratulations and fingers crossed for the ears tomorrow!

 

Wonderful world of weird and wet

Of all theWeird Science genetic recombination mechanisms used by self-cloning creatures, perhaps none is so strange as that of Bdelloid rotifers. The millimeter-long animals are widespread in freshwater environments. When these dry out, Bdelloids themselves dry up, their bodies turning to dust that are blown by the wind to some new, wetter locale for rehydration.

"Their genome is fragmented by the dessication cycle, and they must put it back together again," said biologist David Hillis. "When they land on a new surface and rehydrate, they pick up new parts of DNA. It's all over the environment -- from rotifers that are broken up, from other organisms. They incorporate that into their genome. It's like reproducing with the dead."
 

Squeezing in a last Koh Tao dive tour!

Geoffrey the Grouper

With their PADI Advanced Open Course completed, the diving has been so great that Andy and Christian decided to take one last Koh Tao fun dive tour before leaving our tropical island paradise.

First dive at Chumphon Pinnacles, still with good visibility at depth. Giant groupers, banded boxer shrimp, juvenile eel and a Scribbled File fish!

Second dive we decided to explore the rarely dived west side of Koh Nangyuan, getting dropped off by our friendly boat captain outside Twins.

Good table coral growth, Orange-spined Unicornfish and a Juvenile Yellow Boxfish were observed.

Not done that dive for a while, have to go exploring more often; if any of you guys are up for the challenge?!

 

An ancient 'lost civilization' in Cuba?

Cuba Undwerwater City

During the 1950s Cuban divers and underwater archaeologists found extensive artifact evidence of a Native American civilization on the western end of Cuba that was different and more advanced that the Taino-Arawak people, who migrated to the island beginning around 900 CE.

Their theories are based on the likelihood that Cuba probably functioned as a gateway of ideas, crops and peoples for all of the Americas since Cuba is only 90 miles (144km) from the Florida Keys and 96 miles (154km) from the Yucatan Peninsula.

In late 1990s Russian-Canadian oceanographic engineer, Paulina Zelitsky, used underwater cameras to film structures at 2,200 feet (667m) under water which seem to be pyramids, plazas, mounds, and terraces. The November 2002 issue of National Geographic contained an article on the discovery and speculated that the ruins were 6,000 years old. There was no scientific proof of the assigned date. The article inferred that only people from the Old World could have built such structures, and failed to mention the large structures being built in North America 6,000 years ago.

None of the materials in the apparent structures have been brought to the surface for scientific dating. Little has been done since then to confirm the exact nature of the underwater structures.

Read more...

 

Amazing pictures of how shark photographer made a dummy out of a great white

Great White Dummy

SOARING from the waves in a terrifying display of power, a great white shark clamps its jaws on a helpless baby seal… or so it thinks.

In fact this is one “kill” the ferocious 20ft hunter may find hard to swallow – because it’s just a lifelike imitation made from foam and fibre glass.

The dummy seal was trailed from a fishing boat by wildlife photographer Michael Rutzen as he spent days trying to capture the “shock and awe” of a shark attack in False Bay, South Africa.

Eventually his bait worked – and Michael, 40, is delighted with the spectacular close-up shots he got of the king of the ocean.

He said: “I’d watched how they hunt seals and thought I’d try to tempt one of them using a dummy. Luckily, one of them fell for it.”

Source: www.mirror.co.uk

 

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