The Hidden Treasures of Muck Diving

Captured here by the camera of Lisa and Cian O'Fearghail are the tiny creatures that have created a new love of diving in me, totally different from the excitement of seeing sharks, turtles, or barracuda under the water. These are parts of the micro-life of muck diving, tiny inhabitants of corals, anemones, sea fans, sandy bottoms, and other remote habitats on the reef. They are more difficult to find than the large sharks that swim in depths and thus, despite their size, create a big excitement in divers that enjoy looking for them.

Savvy and local divers like to joke that diving on Sipadan is like watching TV. It's hardly a task to find the sharks and turtles and other large life that swim frequently in its waters. These sea slugs, called nudibranchs, aren't so obvious. These picture here are hardly more than an inch long and although they are brightly colored, they are easily over-looked swimming through a lively coral reef. It takes a keen, experienced (or just lucky) eye to find them. When I first was diving on sites such as Bohayan and Sibuan, DMs and other divers would point these out to me I would look around, all over the reef having no idea what I was even looking for.

Lisa and Cian work as Dive Master and manager of Blue View Divers, a dive shop on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand. I was lucky enough to spend my first several dives with them and they helped me look, feel, and act like I knew what I was doing amidst a large group of other divers who already knew very well what nudibranchs are. Thanks to their knowledge, kind helpfulness, and the beautiful pictures they took underwater, I can share these with you.

The micro life isn't exclusively nudibranchs. There is a multitude of other tiny, rare animals that live on the reef. Tiny shrimps often play symbiotic roles of cleaning, tiny crabs scutter about the reef too small to look appetizing, and juvenile fish flutter about swimming foolishly with their minuscule fins (a personal being a juvenile harlequin sweetlips, which might be the most clumsy and frantic of all swimmers in the ocean).

Pictured here is probably the most popular of the micro-life of diving in Semporna: pygmy seahorses. These little things are smaller than your pinky fingernail and they hang about on large sea fans on the reef. They can be terribly difficult to see, let alone photograph, so again I'm amazed Lisa could capture such a fantastic photograph of this one perched on the fan. Pygmy seahorses take care and patience to see. Often there's is a current in the water and to an inexperienced diver, looking extremely close to a large sea fan when there's a strong current could lead to a horrible collision. Also, diving with a number of other people, it's impossible for everyone to take a peek at the same time. Everyone must take turns shoving their mask up close to the seahorses in order to witness them.

Perhaps it's difficult to imagine enjoying watching a tiny, translucent shrimp running on a anenome more than seeing a shark scan the reef for dinner, but more than looking for the big things in the ocean, it is in the search for the smaller creatures that there are always discoveries to be made. These microscopic animals are vital to the reef's function as an ecosystem and watching them live in a tiny spot on a coral reef shows the entire system for what it is, an enormous inter-connected city of complex functions beyond our imagination.

Room For Improvement: A First Attempt at Underwater Photography, Sipadan

The visibility at Sipidan is often 30 meters plus, not that you can tell from my photos. These pictures are the results of my first go at underwater photography, a humbling, frustrating experience to say the least. Some of the things I learned from my rookie day:Fish are not photogenic. By the time you take out your camera and try to take a shot, the fish are swimming away and all you capture is a thin profile of their fin. When you can get a good side view, good luck asking the fish to stay still so you can capture a photo that is not blurred.The lighting is entirely different than taking photos on land. I don't even pretend to understand how to compensate yet. In my meager defense, I thought the camera I rented was a real piece of crap, but if I had had a top of the line camera I probably would have been even more frustrated since I wouldn't have an excuse for my poor pictures. Photography can potentially ruin diving. While an enormous school of barracuda was circling around the reef, I was trying to figure out the proper settings on the camera instead of enjoying witnessing it. It is very difficult to take a photo that really captures the experience of diving. Here I tried to snap a shot showing the abundance of fish at the drop off, hoping to catch the smaller, more colorful fish in the corals and the huge school of jack fish behind them. The outlines are there, but the colors, the life, the excitement of the reef is absent. Okay, I'm going to say this, then I'll stop complaining and whining about my photos. Above is a picture I took at Sipadan. Below is a picture someone else took at Sipadan. I just don't understand yet. I'm sure that one's doctored, but the diffence is vast. Still, I'm not giving up. Just need to get more diving in somehow.

A school of jack fish circles at the top of the drop off outside Turtle Tomb. I dove this same spot 3 times in my stay in Semporna and they were always there, swimming together. Some of the bigger fish in the middle of the school were nearly 2 meters long.A close-up of the jackfish. I doctored these shots a little trying to compensate for the off colors and lighting. Still looking up how to do that as well. What's Turtle Tomb? This is. Underneath Sipadan is a complex network of caves that are extremely dangerous to dive. It's possible, but very expensive. We swam into the cave 10 meters or so, just for effect. The name comes from the bones of ancient sea turtles found in the caves. Why they're there is a mystery but the two main theories are A. the turtles go there to die B. the turtles swim in, get lost and never find their way out. Here a parrot(?)fish sits on the sandy bottom of the entrance to the Turtle Tomb. So, I guess not all fish are scared of cameras.There really were turtles every where. These pictures are all of different turtles on different parts of the dives. There were so many per dive nobody pointed them out to each other. I couldn't keep track of how many we saw, but if I had to guess, I would say that on some of the dives we saw as many as 35 seperate turtles. Also, it's very faint, but there's a white tip shark blurred into the background of the top-left of the photo. At certain points in the dives the best I could do was count how many seperate turtles were visible at that very moment. The most I counted was 7 turtles around me, some swimming in the deep, some floating around the wall, and others resting amongst the coral on the reef. The reef sharks were just as numerous as the turtles. None of us even pointed them out. The DM started out the dives clanging on his tank to point out the first of the dive, but soon gave up as he didn't want to be playing his tank like an instrument throughout the dive. Probably the worst quality of all the pictures, but I still want to show what I tried to capture here. In the back there are many divers, all looking the same way, gazing at the huge school of barracuda. This school was truly amazing. There could have been as many as 1,000 barracuda all swimming together. If that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one as there were so many you couldn't keep them all in your field of vision. This was at the, aptly named, Barracuda Point, the most famous dive site on Sipadan. I had been on this same site two times already and understood the lays of the reef and the currents. All the other divers were following the school around, fighting the current, increasing the heart rate, and sucking down air. I stayed put in one place, relaxing, breathing comfortably, just waiting for the fish to inevitably turn and circle closer to me. At that point, two white tip sharks cruised over, went right past me and headed for these divers. I tried my best to get a shot of the two sharks heading for the unsuspecting divers, but this was all that turned out. On any other dive site, people would have been excited to see a single shark all day. Here we were at Barracuda Point, and there were so many sharks, and so many other fish to look at in such huge quantity, that these sharks cruised right behind these people without notice.

Why is diving on Sipadan so great?

Before I post all my pictures of it, I'll explain why. Recently Sipadan has been protected, the resorts were all kicked off the island and a permit is now needed to come within a mile of it. Only a hundred permits are issued per day which means getting there can be difficult and requires reservations well in advance. (I was lucky and spent 3 days, 9 dives at Sipadan.) But there are nearly 25 islands off the coast of Semporna, including the famous muck-diving spot of Mabul; what's the big deal about Sipadan?

Aside from Sipadan's magnificent corals, what it's really known for is the big stuff. Hawksbill and green sea turtles are swim in such great number it's not worth trying to count how many you see per dive. White-tip and grey reef sharks are also every present. Huge schools of jackfish and barracuda swim and circle around certain spots. Then there's always the potential for seeing manta rays, whale sharks, or what everyone would really, really love to see: a school of hammerheads.

























On this map is labeled the town of Semporna and the most famous of the numerous islands around it. What this map shows is that Mabul, Kapalai, and Mataking all sit in the "shallow" water, where as Sipadan sits alone (southern-most island on the map), out in the depths. This means that off of its reefs the drop off is drastic, and much, much deeper than that of any other island in the area. In these depths are where the big sea creatures lurk and every so often they will swim along the tall sea walls of Sipadan. The lucky divers are 30 meters deep, off from the wall, and looking out into the blue when these huge rays and sharks happen to cruise near the reef.

This is no short drop off either. This chart shows how Sipadan juts out from the bottom of the ocean, nearly a thousand meters straight up. Mabul by contrast sits in extremely shallow water. Sipadan is a topographicall freak of nature and as such is on every list of the Top 10 dive sites of the world.

My Photos of the Island
The main beach at Sipadan. Those with permits to dive the island are only allowed on a couple hundred meters of the beach.
Taken from the bow of the boat, here's Sipadan's drop off at the dive site Coral Gardens. Out in the deep blue, two DMTs do their swim tests, floating in the water for 15 minutes.