A Tribute to John McCain

John McCain  An American Hero

 It is with a heavy heart that the blog takes a pause from fish watching to remember John McCain.  John McCain was a truly great American.  His bravery is beyond question.  Shot down over North Vietnam, he refused release from a POW camp unless his fellow captives were released, as well.  He went on to live a storied political career, culminating with him preaching bipartisanship to his fellow Republicans.  And unlike most of those fellow Republicans, he had the backbone to call out Donald

A truly brave American.  Not!

Trump.  

   For this last bit of bravery, he inspired the wrath of our craven president.  This is not to say that Mr. Trump is not without courage.  Did it not require bravery to ask Stormy Daniels for a blow job?  And what about walking Ms. McDougal past his wife's bedroom, saying, "I don't think Melania's  home at the moment."   Chutzpah, no?

    On the other hand, Mr. Trump doesn't seem to have the onions to face Robert Mueller, so maybe he is only almost as brave as John McCain.  

    Years ago John McCain nearly became our president.  In one of his most notable acts, he reassured a lady at a campaign rally that Barrack Obama was not an evil man.  That alone assured his place in the pantheon of noble politicians. 

     Were it not for his disastrous pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate, he could well have been our president.  As blue a Democrat as I am, I considered voting for John McCain.  This vice presidential pick has had two long standing ramifications.  First, any black parent can now turn to their son or daughter and say, "Of course you can grow up to be president....as long as you were born in Hawaii and went to Punahou."

A memorable moment in American political theater

    That was a joke. Of course they can be president. 

     Unfortunately the black parent needs to add that they can't be president if they get shot by the po-lice or some crazed vigilante defending the local pharmacy.

    America!  My heart bleeds for you.

    Lastly, were it not for Sarah Palin , vice presidential candidate, we would have been denied one of the funniest skits in the history of comedy.  Sarah giving Tina Fey the fish eye is an iconic shot.   (We chose fish eye over stink eye in keeping with the mission statement of this blog)  I regret that the purloined picture is not quite in focus, but what a memory! 

    "And for those of you at home playing a drinking game...Maverick."

    Now we can get on with the blog.
 
     Yesterday I made it down to the pier.  In large part I was spurred by a Threadfin Jack alert from up Mahukona way.  Luckily, I can see the Kona coastline from my back yard, so, snorkel in hand, I made my way down to the Kailua pier.  Threadfin jacks have been seen at the pier, but not with the same frequency they are seen at Mahukona.  While this may approximate looking for a dime where the light is better   (Yes, I can quote Shakespeare and Bazooka bubblegum wrappers.) the pier is roughly an hour closer.

White Saddle Goatfish, Kailua Bay august 2018

    Things were downright hectic in Kailuaville.  Hurricane Lane had left in his wake a veritable mob eager to escape to the beach after four days of sequestration at home.  I fought my way through the multitude crowding the Ironman beach and started swimming in the warm, clear water.  Almost immediately I saw a pretty good fish.

   Here in the shallows was a single white saddle goatfish.  He was fairly cooperative, allowing a half dozen efforts on my part before disappearing into the coral.  As we have noted previously, this fish, which is Hawaii's only endemic goatfish, is not seen frequently.  John Hoover notes its desirability as a food fish and possible predation by introduced snappers as possible reasons for his small numbers.  In any event, it was really nice to see a worthy fish at the pier.

A Mu plays the palace

    As I swam out, I ran into the baitball.  The breakwater bounding Alii Drive was packed with
fisherman.  Their quarry, the giant school of big eye scad, had retired, well out of casting distance, to the area between the third and fourth swim buoys.  As I traversed this watery herd I got a glimpse of four large ulua.  Camera in hand, I willed those wolves of the sea to return, but they did not.

    At about the same time, diving a healthy cauliflower coral, I spied two speckled scorpionfish on adjoining coral leaves.  As the coral has recovered, this fish has returned, becoming one of the usual suspects on our Kailua Bay snorkel.   

   Way out in front of the palace I saw three Mu, two swimming as a pair.  Over the last month, this fish, also known as the big eye emperor, has become a regular in that location.  Not the most colorful,

Indo-pacific Sergeant, Kailua Bay August 2018

the mu carries itself with stately grace.  I always enjoy them.

   Cognizant that this swim was inspired by the threadfin jack, I spent some time outside the swim buoys.  I didn't see any threadfins, but I did receive a hail from an incoming parachute boat. Way better than getting run down.  

    Close in, where the parachute boat tied up briefly to the pier, I noted this handsome adolescent Indo-pacific sergeant.  Clear water and crisp lines.   Hawaii strong.


jeff


   

Hurricane Hector at Kawaihae

The Legend Lives on in Bloomington, Indiana

    Many of you may know that Hector was the son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the greatest warrior of Troy. He slayed 31,000 Greeks and died in single combat with Achilles in front of the gates of Troy.  He was not married to Helen of Troy.  That honor fell to his brother, Paris; Helen had
deserted her home in Sparta to elope with Paris, hence launching a thousand ships.  In one of the earliest known episodes of vendetta, Paris kills Achilles with a well placed arrow to the heel.  Such an archer must have been one heck of good dart player, but neither Shakespeare nor Homer mentions that part.  For that matter, there is no mention of a pub in Troy. Bloody hell!

The Hairy Hermit Crab in full battle array, bear skins and all.  Hoot man!

   Priam's clan was descended from Dardanus, who was one of two survivors of the Greek flood myth.  Dardanus gives his name to the genus that includes Dardanus lagopodes, that worthy hermit crab who lives in the shallows of  Pemuteran Bay in northwest Bali.  Descended as he is from such noble heroes, it is no wonder that the Hairy Hermit crab has gone to war.  
Sung to the tune of the Minstrel Boy, you are invited to hum the tune as you read on.

   This week Hector gained new prominence, as his name was applied to the first hurricane to threaten our tropical shores in 2018.  The media got all excited, predicting waves as tall as the walls of Troy.  We who live in the blessed lee of Mauna Loa, do not actually believe these dire predictions, although there exists a tradition that when such an alarm is sounded all must repair to the KTA and strip the

Possible  juvenile leatherjacket, Scomberoides lysan hangin' out

grocery store of canned goods.  However, the idea that we might be facing large waves served as an excellent excuse to head up to Kawaihae harbor and test my theory that this is an excellent place to snorkel when high waves persist on the Kona coast.  Or maybe we was just jonesin' for another dip in that biological paradise.

   As we headed north past the Mauna Kea Beach resort, we were looking at fleecy with clouds floating in a blue sky above Kohala mountain.  It is such a treat for us to see a such a sky that I had my lovely bride nab a picture through the windshield.  We parked the faithful Accord in the park at the southwest corner of the harbor under in the shade of a jubjub tree.  Luckily three were no bandersnatches to contend with , so we were soon at the water's edge, which is to say on the massive boat launch from which we take our plunge into the harbor.

As it was  low tide, the military docking platforms just off shore were rising an extra foot above the

The Baby Scribbled Filefish.  A Toddler on his column.

peaceful waters.  If there had been much in the way of surf here at Kawaihae, I could have declared my experiment to be a success, but there was just the faintest of breezes and the ocean on the far side of the breakwater bore at most a nine inch chop.

    The water in the harbor was as flat as the surface of the pool table in the Horse and Helmet back in Troy.  Not stopping for a pint of their fine rich broth of plankton that included a myriad of minuscule jellyfish.

  The usual suspects in Kawaihae include milletseed and saddleback butterflies, disappearing wrasse and juvenile Hawaiian dascyllus, all of which were present as we made our way to the first and then the second platform.  I was hoping to see our baby scribbled filefish near the rope on the second platform.  He was not there, but there were two or three small fish at the surface, the likes of which were unfamiliar to me.   They were tiny fusiform fish  about an inch long, green on top, white below.  They hung almost motionless in the water at a steep angle, the tip of their tail appearing to touch the surface.  When disturbed they would swim down, soon to return to their peculiar position at the surface.  We have an email out to the Great Oz in hopes that he may be able to put a name on this curious beast

    As I was examining the little green fish, Sandra called me announcing that she had located the juvenile filefish.  He had abandoned the ropes, grown out of them, actually, and was hovering by one of the columns about six feet down.  In the intervening fortnight he had almost doubled in length,

Blackfin Chromis, Kawaihae Harbour  August 2018

going from three to five inches, mas o menos.  Sadly, he had lost that charming baby coloration.  No more dots and dashes, he was now bedecked in standard issue scribbled filefish camo gear.  Like a good parent, I did my best to take his picture.  A Kodak moment to be sure.  Turn around and you're one, turn around and you're three.  Turn around and you're a filefish swimming out to the sea.

   Okay you maudlin bastards.  Dry your eyes, put the Kleenex away, and we'll get on with the story.

    We scoured the columns for a nudibranch, but found none.  However, near some coral on one of
the outer columns I found what must be a blackfin chromis.  He was much larger than a usual member of this species and not in a school hovering over the reef.  It was an opportunity to photograph this species, usually so small, flighty and distant.  I hope you appreciate the portrait.

Cup Coral with tentacles extended

    Leaving the platforms, we then swam across the lagoon to the outer breakwater, where as before we located orange cup corals growing in the recesses of the rip rap.  During our first excursion to Kawaihae, Peter had managed a fine picture of a cup coral with its tentacles extended.  Prior to looking at his picture,  I assumed one would need to go there at night to witness that phenomenon.  This time, by searching carefully, I was able to find a specimen with his fine chartreuse tentacles waving in the soup. The better to procure a hearty lunch.

     Our friend Hai had mentioned that this was an area, out along the breakwater, where he had seen reef sharks.  Without telling Sandra why we were doing so, we swam an additional twenty meters seaward.  No sharks appeared and we swam back  over a field of dying coral to the third platform.

    As I approached the platform,  Sandra, who had swum ahead, alerted me to a the presence of a  turtle.  This fellow might have been the most domesticated turtle of all time.   He swam right up to Sandra, looking her right in the goggles.  It is rare when a wild animal, especially one as different from humans as a turtle, behaves this way.  With a feral dog or cat, you might stretch for an explanation.  We have a history with these animals dating

Eye to eye with our Chelonian Chum

back thousands of years.  If there were such a thing as a feral sheep, she might do the same thing.  We have a long, some would say biblical, association with sheep, too.  Especially Scotsmen, New Zealanders and folks from Montana.  That, of course, is a different story and the source of a fine joke that can no longer be told in the work place.  Baa.

    The only history we have with turtles, as far as I know, is associated with soup.  Before he dove down to snack on the algae growing on the rocks, he paddled over and said hello to me, too.  This isn't the prettiest picture of a turtle that you will ever see, but it does give you the chance to go eye to eye with a friendly aquatic reptile.  Not an everyday occurrence, to be sure.

   At this point, Sandra, in a state of chelonian bliss, said, "Wow.  We've seen everything except an octopus!"  Well, that wasn't exactly true.  In fact, having not found a nudibranch, we were a little light in the mollusc department.  Happy as the clam that she didn't see, Sandra swam to shore.  I spent a while more looking for nudibranchs.  And not finding any.

The Husky Cushion Star

    On the way in, I spotted a pair of cushion stars separated by less than a meter.  One was Husky
purple and the other red and orange, the colors of the Trojans.  Not Priam, Hector et al, but the rich kids from South Central, the University of Spoiled Children, USC, home of Tommy the Trojan.  Yuck.

   I think the purple cushion star was preparing to eat the orange one.  And then have sex with his girlfriend.

    Probably can't talk about that in the workplace, either.  Do you think Mr. Moonves would like to join me for an IPA?

    As I reached the landing strip, aka the giant boat launch, I discovered that Sandra was holding court with our friend Hai.  Hai strolled over to where I was gauging the wisdom of crawling out onto slippery pavement and asked if I had seen the wire coral gobies.  Seen them?  I wasn't even sure if I had heard of them.  He told me to swim out to the second platform, look at the wire on the sea side

The Wire Coral Goby, Kawaihae, 2018

dangling in the water and that is where they would be.  Indeed, he was right.  These are peculiar looking little fish, looking more like a tropical catfish, sans barbels, than a goby.  A picture being worth a thousand words, I won't bore you with a description.  I'm a little embarrassed by my photographic effort; this picture may be worth 850 words.  Hai says that they have been reliable on that wire for about two weeks, so God willing, I will have another chance.  Sandra, who did not accompany me back to the goby wire, is anticipating her chance at this life fish.

   When I finally made my landing, Sandra and Hai were full of stories. First, they had to show me an incredibly small fish that was hanging by the boat launch.  Hai swears it was a baby great barracuda.  He was an inch long and an inch below the surface,  with a series of horizontal stripes.The wave pattern overlapping the 'cuda was made by water dripping from the camera.

    There is more than one species of barracuda in Hawaii and three make it into John Hoover's book.  The blackfin barracuda is still a life fish for yours truly.  And it has a pattern of horizontal stripes.  Our new best friend Hai swears when that he has researched this fish and this mini-cuda is a great, but as Nathan Lane said in the Birdcage, "When the schmecken beckons..." or in this instance,  you have to make sure that what you are looking at is not a life fish.  Information like this is hard to find, but we will try.

An extreme juvenile barracuda. 

   While I was taking the picture of the barracuda, Sandra and Hai were discussing the dripping camera, specifically that it had just replaced a TG 3 that had stopped working for the most trivial of reasons, a drop of a mere two and a half feet.  Hai said he might be able to fix it. In fact, he had recently fixed a TG 1 of Peter's.

    My ears perked up at this, although I was immediately reminded of a situation about thirty five years ago.  I  had a chess computer (this was back in the days when I could play chess without getting angina) which had ceased to work.  In a moment of hubris, I had taken off the back and was looking at the guts: a couple of solid state boards, a resistor, a transistor  and who knows what else.  Our dog, Freckles, a Springer Spaniel of infamous repute watched on.  At this moment my wife walked in and said, "So now you are a computer repairman."

   Check and mate.

   To protect the innocent, I will let you catch up with Hai and have him tell you about the TG 1.  He seems to be ever at Kawaihae harbor and perhaps he will show you a reef shark.  That is our current goal, to see a shark with Hai.  Wish us luck.

jeff

Last night Hurricane Hector spun away, a hundred miles to the south of the Big Island.  In celebration I'm inviting you all down to the Trojan Horse.  The Ilium pale ale is on me.

A quick follow up:  The question of the little green and white fish was put to John Hoover who passed it along to Bruce Mundy of NOAA in Honolulu.  Those two experts hazard this guess: a juvenile leatherjacket,  Scomberoides lysan.  Keoki  Stender has a picture of such a juvenile at Hanuma Bay, Oahu which is indeed green over white.  The behavior of these tiny fish was really bizarrre.  If they are extreme juveniles they will probably outgrow this strange behavior and be gone.  In the meantime, we can all keep our eyes open and be grateful that when we find something truly unusual there are experts like John Hoover to call upon.

   By the way, as John answered my query,  he was in the airport in Seoul on his way to see some super cool fish in the Indian Ocean.  What a lucky duck!













   












'

   

A Political Rhyme for the Season

  Having referenced Walt Kelley, that great American humorist and poet, in our last blog, I am offering you a small piece that I believe Walt would approve of.  Mightily.  As Walt was not above borrowing popular literary vehicles, I feel empowered to do the same;  you may recognize the source poem.

Thinking about Paul Manafort while Shopping at Target    By Jeffrey Hill

Whose rugs are these, I think I know.
His house is in Long Island, though.
He will not see me shopping here.
He does not like cheap suits or beer.

An Oriental Sweetlips imitating Paul Manafort.  Sooner or later they will both be wearing stripes.

Kahalalala and Kalamazoo

    Here we are in the middle of the summer.  This is the time of year when it is reasonable to expect to see something really interesting when you go out snorkeling.  The reef fish have had time to make keikis and these babies should be showing up on our reefs.

Speckled Scorpiofish hunkered down in the coral.  Kailua Kona Pier 2013

    With that in mind, we headed to the City of Refuge earlier in the week.  There was some debate
about this choice back at the Mother Ship.  The various weather services said it was going to rain
everywhere, but especially in Captain Cook. Naturally, when we got there the weather was perfect with blue skies and, as predicted, a calm sea.  Plunging in off the Two Step rock entry, we were greeted by pleasantly cool and clear water, about 84 degrees, which for my taste is perfect.

    We swam for about an hour, covering a large portion of the bay and seeing a nice variety of fish but nothing unusual.  The dolphins did not make an appearance and the shark was not at home.  We enjoyed the swim, but from the standpoint of wildlife observation, it was close to a bust.

   The following day, Sandra dropped me off at the pier, while she went shopping.  The first thing I noticed was a contingent of local fisherman concentrated at the corner of the swim area where it meets the Homeland Security cruise boat embarkation structure. Its not uncommon to see a fisherman

A Promar floating bait net.

or two in that spot, but this was a large group.  And they were going at it fairly seriously, casting small live baits about thirty feet out into the swim area.

    I took my usual swim out to the palace and back, finding a speckled scorpionfish in a nice chunk of cauliflower coral about ten feet down.   On my first dive I nabbed a picture.  Back on the surface, I fiddled with the camera to get the proper settings.  And then, try as I might, I could not find that lone piece of living coral again. This fish lives well inside the leaves of the coral and one must be lucky to penetrate with the flash to get the a picture of the reclusive fish.  Suffice it to say, the picture I took is of the outer part of the coral.  I'm including a picture of the Speckeld scorpion peering out from his refuge taken in about the same spot five years ago. 

   Back by the pier I dodged under the swim line and snorkeled in front of the cruise boat landing, where the fishermen were unable to go.  Regrettably, I had not out flanked them and I saw nothing unusual.  When I got back on the pier, I walked over to where the fisherman were still going at it.  In the water, moored to the pier with line, were two colorful floating rings with suspended nets.    Slightly larger than your standard bucket, they had a

Deck the Halls With Boston Charlie.

round inflatable float on top.  I have scoured the web to no avail looking for exactly what I saw.  I can now say that these were floating collapsible bait buckets.  Extra fancy.  One was lime green and the other a handsome nautical orange.  I'm including a picture from the Cabela's catalogue so you can get a general idea.  The buckets in question had rings to keep them from collapsing inward.


    The fisherman nearest me, at the edge of the pack, as it were, was a large Hawaiian lady of about fifty.  Seated contentedly on a folding chair, she held a long rood, perhaps ten feet in length.  The line was in the water and she was not casting.  I asked what they were fishing for.  She fixed me with a
look, aficionado adressing a tyro.  "They fishing for some kind of mackerel." she said, "Name like
like fa la la la la."  Or at least that is what I heard.

    So as I showered and dressed, I sang that old Christmas favorite just under my breath.  This was

 Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash and Kalamazoo.
Mollie's freezing on the trolley.  Eisenhower, Cauliflower alligaroo.

Jeff Leicher, Ace raconteur and owner of Jack's Dive Locker

   This is an old, very old ditty composed by Walt Kelley.  He inflicted it on the minds of the unsuspecting youth in his immortal comic strip, Pogo.  Regardless of Kelley's lyrics, I could hear the Hawaiian lady throwing fa la la la la at me all the while.

   On the way from the dressing room to the cubbies, I ran into someone from the distant past.  Jeff Leicher, the owner of jack's Dive Locker, was locking the gate to the pier.  Presumably he had just delivered the company van to the area behind the dressing rooms  in order to retrieve a class of student divers from the Inner Harbour.  I introduced myself and told him that he had guided my son and I on a snorkel trip about thirty five years ago. He replied with a jocular remark to the effect that we really couldn't be that old.

   Jeff had skippered the dive boat that day in the early eighties and had produced my two wish list fishes: the pyramid butterflyfish and the pennant butterflyfish.   The latter is the only member of the Heniochus butterflies that occurs in Hawaii.  The ones we saw that day turned out to be the only pennanat butterflies that I would ever see in Hawaii.  Pyramids, as you know if you follow the blog, are found here and there sporadically and at Mahukona dependably.

   Fish watching aside, it was a fateful trip.  A young couple who worked aboard the boat had brought along their blue crowned conure, a small stout parrot,  which patrolled the dashboard of the cabin.  Charles was so taken with the bird that soon a similar aratinga parakeet was part of our family.  The adventures of Mikey could fill a whole chapter.  He was a hand raised bird and the seller told us if he bit, we should hold him upside down and yell "No biting!" at him.  This worked to the extent that on a given day, as we entered our home, he might yell "No biting!" in the way of a greeting.  As you might guess, he never stopped biting. 


   Jeff recalled the parrot and said that his owner had become bored with being a dive guide and 
joined Sea Shepherd, where he did battle on the high seas in defense of whales and other marine

Socrates, Sigmund Freud and Billy the Kid go to the San Dimas Mall

animals.  What a guy!

   On the way home, I told Sandra about my encounter with Jeff, the on going legend of Mikey including the Sea Shepherd piece, and about the fishermen.  Then I asked her if she could identify the lyrics "Deck the halls with Boston charlie.".  She absolutely hates that game.  But it was the way I was raised. So what can you do?  My father called it the Socratic Method, as if he ever met Socrates.  (You may score yourself ten points if you pronounced that name so, as in so what and crates, as in the wooden box containing oranges.)

    At home I repaired to the fish books and discovered that Fa la la la la might very well translate to

Kahala, which is the name Hawaiians apply to the greater amberjack.  this is a large game fish that,

Amberjack  photo courtesy of Reel Revenge, SW Florida fishing charters

according to John Hoover, hunts the baitball in packs.  I can not tell you why, on the countless occasions when I have encountered the bait ball (composed of hundreds large eye scad) I have not seen this pack hunting amberjack phenomenon.  For what it is worth, the Hawaiian fishing regulations note that the amberjack occurs mostly off shore and in deeper water. 

    We have seen ulua hunt the baitball in groups of up to six on numerous occasions.  Here I am speaking only of the blue fin trevally, which is far and way the most common in shore jack.  At least six other jacks are called ulua, but they are uncommon on the reef.   The ulua is a pretty blue fish that hunts singly or in groups.  Its

Three ulua charge the baitball near the fourth swim buoy.  Kailua Kona April 2017

not uncommon to see up to three  ulua hunting with one or more blue goatfish.  We've also
seen them hunt with eels and octopus.  Most ulua we encounter are under 16 inches.  occasionally, though, we encounter a larger one and it can be pretty intimidating. 

    Yesterday, following my reunion with Jeff Leicher and the subsequent reminiscence about pyramid butterflyfish, we trekked north to Mahukona.   As predicted, it was a nice day and we made the swim out to the school of pyramid butterflies.  Using Google maps I calculate that it is about a quarter mile swim out to where the pyramids hang out.  Needless to say, Sandra and I feel pretty lucky that we are still able to make that swim.

    Along the way we saw a pair of Heller's barracuda.  This fish is not terribly common in most places, although it is known to occur at Mahukona regularly.  The swim was into a modest current,

A pair of Heller's Barracuda at Mahukona  july 2018

which meant it was easier swimming back.  Always a good thing.  We got a school of milletseed butterflies  and a solitary saddle back butterfly offshore.  Before we got out, we saw two bluestripe butterflies in the little bay.

     At the ladder we were mobbed by five Hawaiian kids.  Between six and eight, they swam like a troop of friendly otters, taking great delight in jumping off the pier.  They were accompanied by an auntie who grew up in Kohala but now lives in San Francisco.  She told us how lucky we were to live in Hawaii.  And she was right!

jeff

Pyramid Butterflyfish, City of Refuge 2014 

Sandra Meets Mrs. Scribble's Children

    Give us a new place to snorkel with a variety of interesting animals and we will make the most of it.   Having been introduced to Kawaihae harbor, seeing better fish and new invertebrates, we made the drive back north just a a few days after our introductory adventure with Peter and Marla.

Possibly an Orange Stylinos sponge in the shape of the USA.

    The sky was not bright blue, as it had been on our first visit, but the air was crystal clear.  Such a difference from down in Kailua where my lovely wife has become an aficionado of the AQI, air quality index.  We were happy to enjoy a clear look at a few cirrus clouds as they hovered over Kohala Mountain.  After living in the vog, the crystal clear panorama of  Kawaihae Harbor from the road was a treat.

     We parked the car under a tree in the little Kawaihae harbor park and walked across the large gravel parking area,  entering as before from the boat ramp.  Looking for fish as we swam out to the structures, we spotted a disappearing wrasse, but the tiny sailfin tang juvenile was nowhere to be seen. On our first visit to Kawaihae, Sandra had spotted, for a treasured moment, the common but rarely observed Kellogg's Scorpionfish.  While I was scouting for the tang, she was searching the rip rap for her scorpion.  Suffice it to say, our efforts on this day were equally Quixotic. 

Go Huskies!  Do it like a sponge. 

    Once out at the structures, I was admiring the different sponges, secure in the knowledge that unless I took some home and looked at the spicule structure under a microscope, their identification was beyond my ability to place a name upon them. 
   
      I like this picture of an orange sponge that may well be an orange stylinos; at least it looks very similar to the picture in John Hoover's Sea Creatures.  This particular individual has a shape similar to the United States, with Baja California hanging down the left coast.  John Hoover tells us that it is a friable sponge, as easily torn as our unfortunate country under the current and benighted president.


    But heck.  Were at Kawaihae!  Let's not get depressed.

Scrawled Filefish Juvenile.  Kawaihae July 2018

With the Husky football season in the offing, I was especially enthusiastic about the little purple ones.   But Go Dogs!  Do it like a sponge!  What does he mean by that?  Great Husky defenses have, in the past,  been given names...like Purple Reign.  I ask you, does Purple Sponge not sound pretty awesome?  We soak up the opposing offense.

     As far as I can tell , there is no sponge in Sea Creatures to correspond to these one-eyed, one vent tiny purple plankton eaters.

Peek a boo filefish

    As I was dodging around the cement columns, I heard Sandra call my name.  I disentangled myself  from the maze of columns and swam around the structure to where I could see her holding position by the ladder.  My first impulse was, "Thank goodness she seems to be safe."  I trust that as you read these accounts of this unusual snorkeling site, you appreciate that swimming around in tight spaces is not with out some risk.  Suffice it to say, it was immediately obvious to us.

Not as good a picture, but in this one you see the whole three inches. 

    I swam to Sandra and she raised her head and said, "Baby filefish!"  I swam close to the ladder where she was pointing and saw something I never would have hoped for: a tiny  elongated filefish doing his best to imitate the weedy ropes hanging vertically from the ladder.  I surfaced and said to Sandra, " I guess this means you don't have to cook for the rest of the week."

    This little fella was about three inches long, his base color was a creamy caramel over which was a pattern of dark chocolate spots and wavy lines.  If one were to open a package Christmas morning and find such a toothsome confection, I dare say,  one would be more than pleased.

   Thankfully, the juvenile filefish was cooperative and I took many pictures.  Naturally, he wanted to be on the other side of a rope, so the picture taking was a little challenging.  But he let me take as many pictures as my heart desired and I'm sure you will appreciate the results.

Feather Duster Worm  Kawaihae  2018

   Shortly after that we met a gentleman who was also out enjoying the animals on the columns.  I believe his name is Hai On and he he was the one that turned our friend Peter on to this snorkel site.  Hai had seen the tiny filefish... and a larger one.  He was a wealth of information and soon guided us to a couple fine feather duster worms.

   After we dove around the poles photographing the feather dusters, he guided us in to the first structure, which is much smaller than the outer two.  Unless I am mistaken, it pre-dates those larger ones.  Although the columns look identical above water, there are larger coral aggregations on the posts of the first structure..  Under one of these posts, Hai had found a banded coral shrimp.  One had only to dive down about eight feet and turn around, so he was looking up at the depression in the bottom of the coral.  And voila!  There was the banded shrimp. Hai is clearly a superior diver and I believe he got a picture of that crustacean.  All I got was a pretty good look and water in the ears.

 The larger Scrawled Filefish Juvenile

    Around the corner from the shrimp, he showed Sandra and I a marvelous large reticulated cowry.  We then discussed the filefish, which he correctly identified as scrawled filefish.  He noted that there was a larger juvenile hanging around that same structure, allowing that the reason we probably didn't see it was that he had chased it around trying for the best picture.

    After Hai went in, Sandra and I swam out to the outer structure, where I eventually found and recorded the larger of the juvenile scribbled filefish.  (I prefer the older common name and so does Sandra...Mr. Scribble is her totem.)  This individual, perhaps eight inches in length, was wearing a pattern common in some adult scribbled filefish.  If we had any concerns about the identification, this fish put them to rest.

   When I made it back to shore,  Sandra and Hai were chatting away on the boat launch.  We promised that we would see each other again in this amazing spot.

jeff

A Bivalve Growing in the matrix.  Possibly a Pen Shell!

On the Trail of the Baby Blue Sponge

    I sort of promised that I would get back to you if I was able to identify the blue sponge living near the surface on one of the military structures in Kawaihae harbor.  It took a couple days, but I now

A second example of the Bue Kawaihe sponge

have a couple responses that I thought I would share.  If you are a really smart invertebrate zoologist, this will not come as much of a surprise.  For me, it is a real eye opener.

   At this point you might want to refer back to the previous post for a look at the habitat and at the first picture of the blue sponge.  A second picture is included here.

   Pauline Fiene is a biologist and a dive guide on Maui.   Along with Cory Pittman she maintains a superb site that allows an amateur, like yours truly, to take a very good shot at visual identification of nudibranchs found in Hawaii.  She thought that our sponge might be Dysidea sp. and sent me link to a site in French Polynesia which won't open.

    Google searching Dysidea I found several images of this genus of sponges and many of them are blue.  There is a sponge in the Caribbean , Dysidea ethera, known as the heavenly sponge that is a lovely blue and looks like one of my two pictures.  I'm including one of the several pictures of this sponge posted by Snorkel St. John.  (If you happen to be going to St.John, it would be really nice if you could go snorkeling with this worthy company.)

Heavenly Sponge, Dysidea etherea  thanks to SnorkelStJ.com

   I have it on good authority that Mike Lindell is importing Heavenly sponge in bulk  from the
American Virgin Islands and including it in his patented fill, thus assuring that My Pillow provides the sweetest of dreams.  That he is busy exterminating this species in the wild is of no consequence to Mr. Lindell.  Being a staunch supporter of Donald Trump he does not believe that sponges are animals and the only conceivable reason God put them on this earth was to be used (as pillow stuffing) by man.

   Without knowing Pauline very well at all, I get the sense that, like me, she enjoys identifying animals by sight.  This method is the mainstay of birdwatching.  And I can assure you from first hand experience, it is a rare ornithologist that is not also a birdwatcher in the strict sense of the word.  This

means that while he might want to catch the little bird in his net and count and measure its feathers, he is perfectly happy to identify it by sight alone and repair to his life list where he checks it off over a tumbler of single malt.

Dr. De Maintenon.  Lookin' for sponge in all the wrong places

   Fishwatching is a lot like birdwatching.  Reef fish are large, colorful and there are not too many of them. If you can identify 200 species by sight, you are doing really well.  To be honest, I have not been around enough ichthyologists to know how many keep a life list, not to mention their preference for Highland dew.  I do know that they like to collect fish for examination.  And, of course, unlike a bird, which can be released after one measures its feathers, by the time you count the scales in the lateral line of a fish ( a common tool for identification) the fish is, to paraphrase John Cleese, an ex-fish, it is deceased, it is no more, on the way to the poki shack.

   But invertebrate watching is a totally different game.  All George W Bush jokes aside, there are brazillions of invertebrates.  (Ok.  I squeezed in one George Bush joke.  But the joke is on us...who ever thought we would remember W's tenure in the White House as the good old days?)  For example, the charming Ms. Fiene has photographs of a multitude of nudibranchs, probably hundreds, on her web site.  She may be able to identify most of them on the spot as she watches it crawl up a sponge encrusted column.  If so, at some level, this is not normal.  But in a good way.

   Never the less, she is still using visual identification of the whole, undisturbed animal.  Bird watching technique.

    As I told you in the previous blog, I sent a request for help to Marta De Maintenon, a professor of invertebrate zoology at UH Hilo.  Here is here response:

Hi Jeff,   Slugs are Tambja morosa and Goniobranchus vibratus (as you guessed). Sponges in Hawaii are not identifiable without spicule preps, and even with doing that half the time they can't be identified. This is in part because to the best of my knowledge there have
been few assessments of sponges from Hawaii, the last was a taxonomic paper published in 1951, and a key published in the 1970s that I find dubiously useful. BTW blue isn't unusual in sponges oddly enough.    M

Haliclona sp.  the Bright Violet Sponge

    If this is true, why does our good friend and mentor John Hoover have pictures of 32 species of sponges in his book?  I'm glad he does.  It gives me a place to start. Some of those sponges are pretty common and I feel like I can identify them in the field.  But Marta's comments should gives the  novice field biologist pause.  A spongeful of pause. 

   Surprisingly, when I read her note, I actually knew what she was talking about.  And I had known for at least two days.  When I researched the last blog, I ran across an article on the internet: Hawaiian Marine Sponges: Hilo Coastline by Jaaziel Garcia.  As it turns out, Sr. Garcia got his BS

The Bright violet Sponge as it appears in a margarita glass

from Hilo and Marta was his professor and this topic...our topic...was the subject of his senior thesis.  In his article he shows us at least fifteen species of sponge collected from near Hilo, both in their natural state and as a spicule prep.  I encourage you to read it and here is a link:

https://hawaiisponges.wordpress.com/

At the beginning of his article, Sr. Garcia gives us some real zoological philosophy.

    Marine sponges were once thought to be one of the simplest multicellular organisms of the metazoans. Instead, these organisms are actually highly complex and ecologically

Spicules from the Dirty Yellow Sponge

important to the reef ecosystem.

   That's heavy stuff for those of us that might blithely quote that study where you put a sponge in a Waring blender, pour it into a margarita glass and it re assembles itself.  Sr. Garcia would ask you to take that myth with a grain of salt.  And possibly some tequila and lemon.  Hold the spicules.

   In the event that the link doesn't work, I'm including a few pictures from his article so you get the idea of what a spicule prep looks like. I feel confident that with his name and topic you and Mr. Google can put your cursor on sponge blog (square pants?) in a trice. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the different sponges I see at Kawaihae, which is truly sponge heaven.  But any identifications I make are going to include one of those mental asterisks.

    Now, like a true ornithologist, I'm going to find a tumbler and work on my list.   

jeff

A Great Day at Kawaihae

    Kawaihae is a small town at the apex of the Great Kohala Bight, a name I coined yesterday as

The Great Kohala Bight

Sandra and I drove north to join our friends Peter and Marla for a very special snorkel.  Kohala includes the northern portion of leeward side of the Big Island.  From Waikoloa the coast bends north east,  inward to Kawaihae, at which point the coast reaches north and west, creating the bight.  The scooping of the shoreline means that there is less wave action at Kawaihae and perhaps this is the reason that in 1957 the Army Corps of Engineers began development of the only deep water port on the west side of Hawaii Island.  The town is dwarfed by the port facilities.  As one makes the turn north towards Hawi, he (or she) would be excused for failing to notice the town of Kawaihae, but its impossible to miss the three large breakwaters and the collection of Matson containers found at the port.

Peter and Marla point the way out into Kawaihae harbor.

    About two months ago, Peter told us of meeting a gentleman who trumpeted the snorkeling in Kawaihae harbor.  I had heard of  snorkeling at Kawaihae before, but never in such tantalizing details.  Among the promised critters were nudibranchs!  Since then we have been working towards the day when we could join our friends and search for sea slugs.

   The harbor, which is enclosed by a serious chain link fence topped with four strands of barbed wire,  is accessed through two gates on the makai side of the road.  Opposite the port there are a few
restaurants, a dive shop and an art gallery...Kawaihae is a short drive from the swanky resorts of the Mauna Kea and the Mauna Lani.  Once you pass through a gate, the actual port is still protected by a checkpoint.  Once through a  gate, avoid the checkpoint and the actual port and take the huge gravel road along the south side of the large lagoon.  About 50 yards before you would run into the breakwater, a boat launch appears on your right.  And just off shore one sees three large structures used by the military.  It doesn't look like much, but those structures and the myriad of cement columns that support them are the miracle of Kawaihae invertebrate heaven

   It was at this spot that we parked next to Peter and Marla.  As we donned our snorkeling gear, and

The boat launch and the first mooring structure.

Peter and Marla explained the plan,  Sandra nabbed a couple really good pictures with her cell phone.  The first shows our guides pointing out into the lagoon and the second shows the first of those three structures.  You can see that it rises about twelve feet above the water.  Use your imagination and picture a ship that needs a pier twelve feet above the water against which to moor.  Now ask yourself, how much does that ship draw?   Such was the engineering expertise of the corps, that a deep water ship can moor against those structures which at some points are a mere twenty feet from the breakwater.  Suffice it to say, the forest of cement columns upon which those structures rise go seriously deep.
 

   It was a piece of cake to slip off the side of the boat launch and into six feet of water.  The water,

Black cave sponge living next to the common vagabond sponge

shielded by the breakwaters, was calm and cool.  As we swam out, we encountered a variety of things suspended in the water including numerous tiny jellyfish.

    It was high tide, and when we got to the first structure.  Although the bottom of this mooring platform was less than two feet from the water surface.  It wasn't like you could swim under the platform and not be able to surface for air, but it sort of felt that way.  But swim under the platform we did, finding unusual invertebrates attached to the forest of cement pylons.

    Although we were looking for nudibranchs, the first thing I noticed were a variety of small sponges that were new to me.  Peter had warned us that by swimming under the platform we would encounter animals that would commonly be found in caves.  Yellow dactylospongia, a cave species, was common.  I failed to get a good picture of that one, but what about this  black cave sponge?  Who even knew it existed?

Snowflake coral with polyps extended and feeding

   Shortly after entering the space under the first platform, I encountered a snowflake coral.  This is a soft coral that grows like a group of gray winding sticks.  We were lucky, as the polyps on this coral were out and feeding.   Later I encountered a colony where this wasn't the case; it looked just like a bunch of gray sticks and I'm sure I wouldn't have given it a second thought.  In this case, though, Sandra and I got a chance to marvel at all the little polys foraging for plankton.



 
     By the time we made it to the second mooring structure, we still hadn't seen a nudibranch.  Peter and Marla, better divers than yours truly were swimming down the columns to a depth of about fifteen feet.  At last, Peter found a Gloomy Nudibranch  about twelve feet down.  we took turns

Gloomy Nudibranch, Kawaihae Harbor July 2018

diving for a picture.  On the day we saw at least three of this species.  It isn't terribly surprising that the pattern of spots is different from one individual to another.  This is also the case with the green geckos who live in our house.  There is a theory that geckos are territorial and that if you chase one out, it will do his best to sneak back in.  As a result, when she catches one, Sandra takes it for a walk and releases it a few houses down.  If we were really smart, we would photograph each gecko prior to transportation.  Then, as if he had been fingerprinted, we would know if he had made the trek back up the street and re-entered Casa Ono.

    But I digress.

    I was luckier with these Gloomy Gusses, er, nudibranchs, and I have more than one picture of which I am understandably proud.  I will start you off with this one and at the same time promise something even better later in the blog.

A baby blue sponge clinging to the column.  Kawaihae July 2018

    Our friend Marla is in love with nudibranchs.  for those of you who are less familiar, let me give
you a nudibranch primer.  They are often called sea slugs, even by the scientists who specialize in them.  And, like slugs, they are molluscs. They bear a pair of cephalic rhinophores that look like blunt antennae and are sensitive to smell.  They belong to the family opistobranchia, wich is Latin for gills behind; those fancy appendages on the tail end of a nudibranch are his gills.  Like terrestrial slugs, nudibranchs are hermaphroditic and exchange both male and female products of conception with their partner.  so there are no boy or girl nudibranchs.  In this way, the kingdom of nudibranchs is a bit like Sweden, where they have pronouns that would include a child of either sex. 

   Before I leave you here, I'm going to show off one more sponge, a baby blue number that as of yet I can not identify.  this particular beauty was clinging to a pylon near the water line.  I have written to our internet consultant, Marta De Maitenon, PhD, ace invertebrate zoologist, and perhaps she can name this handsome animal.

Milletseed Butterfly, Kawaihae, July 2018.  Hello!

   We swam around the end of a small breakwater and into an area that sported lots of dead coral and some fine remaining stands of pillar and plate coral.  In there, I saw my second milletseed butterflyfish on the day.  Isn't he cute?













      On the far breakwater, Marla found us many colonies of orange cup coral.  Despite their fleshy appearance, these colorful animals are true stony corals.  Peter and I engaged in a small unspoken contest to see who could get the best picture of these cooperative animals.  In my endeavor to

Orange Cup coral, Kawaihae July 2018

surpass the maestro, I cut my knee on the rocks.  All in the name of science.

















     On the way back to the platforms, i saw what was for me the second best fish of the day...a Disappearing Wrasse.  the water was a little cloudy, but I'm not sure that fully explains the distortion I found in all my pictures.  This was only the second disappearing wrasse I had seen in Hawaii.  When I called Peter over to look at it, he was nice enough, agreed that it was a disappearing wrasse and then

Disappearing Wrasse, Kawaihae 2018

went on to say that at diving depths it is hardly an uncommon fish.   Sort of like enjoying Alzheimer's Disease (because you always get to meet new people) snorkeling allows you to get excited about fish a scuba diver finds pedestrian.











       If I had any shame, I would wind things up.  But when we made it back to the platforms, Peter suddenly went nuts.  He found at least two more gloomy nudibranchs.  These guys were very near the surface and Sandra, who doesn't dive twelve feet even on a good day, was able to enjoy them.  Also in relatively shallow water, he found this other small species.  yellow with white pustules (I'm

Geniobranchus vibratus, the Trembling Nudibranch Kawaihae July 2018

quoting here) purple rhinophores and gray gills also lined with purple, this is Geniobranchus vibratus.  I'm not sure that this handsome little devil has a common name as accepted by the International Academy of Nudibranchologists, but that doesn't stop the boys at Wikipedia.  They call it the Trembling Nudibranch.  If you can have a quaking aspen, why not  trembling nudibranch? By any name, its a beauty, and unless I am mistaken its a life sea slug for Marla.




       While we were watching the trembling nudibranch, a group of boys had escaped the Kawaihae intermdiate school and occupied the second mooring platform.  From that dizzying height, they were leaping into the water, safe in the knowledge that the Corps of Engineers was maintaining a substantial depth into which they could plunge with impunity.  Sort of like the way Donald Trump plunges into a Playboy centerfold.  But with any luck at all, with less impunity in the long run.

Bombs over Stormy Daniel's, as we say at Kawaihae Intermediate.

    Presidential politics aside, as I was attempting to get the perfect shot on quaking sea slug, I was subjected to a series of loud splashes, sort of like a depth charge going off next door.  Coulda, shoulda, woulda been a bit distracting, but us wild life photographers have a keen sense of concentration when our rhinophores smell a really good shot in the making.





    I know I should be letting you go, but I have one more fish story.  About five years ago I was swimming with my older son in the lagoon at the Hilton Hotel at Waikoloa.  There is every reason to believe that this pond is not stocked; fish are washed over the breakwater.  Every now and then we see something remarkable there and, because it is in theory a wild fish, I feel it can be counted.  But in the back of my mind, that species retains an asterisk.  On that day, Charles and I saw an immature sailfin tang.

Juvenile Sailfin Tang, Kawaihae July 2018

  It was about four inches top to bottom, with a strange fin arrangement, it was in the awkward teenager phase.  However, its dramatic vertical stripes, golden, black and silver gave it away as a developing sailfin tang.  We corroborated our sighting in the older copy of Hoover and I never saw another.  Until yesterday.

   As I swam past the first mooring structure, I saw a tiny edition of the juvenile sailfin tang among the coral growing on the rip rap..  He was as shiny as a silver dollar and about the same size.  Probably an inch and a half.  And this diamond-shaped baby was delightfully cooperative.  I got several good shots and I hope you enjoy this one.

    I realize that this was a marathon blog.  In my defense, its summer,so the water isn't at all cold.  As a result we swam for the better part of two hours.  And, as you can see, we were snorkeling in a location that has a lot to offer.
And, as promised, I'm leaving you with one more picture of the not so gloomy nudibranch which should be ample reward for your persistance.

jeff

 Gloomy Nudibranch imitating a peacock.