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Night dives
WTDNJul09_DiveStory
Night dives
See the true colours of coral
Anyone who has ever dived in The Bahamas at night will know the transformation that comes over a reef after dark, when what looked like rock formations in the daylight turn into a throbbing surface of polyps—the tiny organisms that actually create the reefs.
“You see octopus at night, and lots of crustaceans, lobster and crabs walking around,” says Stuart Cove, founder of Stuart Cove’s Dive Bahamas. “But the most spectacular change is the coral. Because you take your own light down, you see the true colours. And all the surfaces become furry as the polyps come out to feed.”
These creatures are small cylindrically shaped animals just like sea anemones and jellyfish, except that they secrete an outer skeleton of calcium carbonate.
Polyps thrive in water that hardly ever drops below 70º F, says Cove. Strictly speaking, much of The Bahamas should be too far north to support reefs. However, the Gulf Stream provides a flowing, warm-water sanctuary that creates conditions so favourable that the 100-mile-long barrier reef off the east coast of Andros is the third-largest biological construction on earth (behind the barrier reefs of Australia and Belize).
Most reef animals are territorial to the point of foolhardiness. The yellow and black-striped sergeant major, and numerous small, bright species of damselfish will attack divers and even, on occasion, the Caribbean reef shark, which is at the top of the reef’s food chain. Another highly territorial fish is the grouper, a type of sea bass that is a staple of Bahamian cuisine.
The most aggressive groupers are called supermales. Having started their lives as females, they undergo a spontaneous sex change when they reach a certain size (usually about two feet), allowing them to defend a territory.
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