A Christmas snorkel at Fossil Beach was nice and quiet. Not a single boat around and the water was nice and clear. While my partner headed off to find fossil shark teeth (she found nine of varying sizes), I swam along the reef. This area can appear a bit dirty but I find it to be quite productive for critters. It’s a settlement zone for nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More and sediment behind a countercurrent that runs north from Mentone. The substrate is quite rocky and covered in lots of sea grapes. There are some barren areas with significant coral reef, including patches that may predate European settlement. It’s thought that they might grow about 10cm every hundred years, so some of the boulders the size of motocycle helmets might be 300 years old.
There was a smattering of the usual suspects. There are often the majestic Southern Eagle Rays hanging out around here. I also found the remnants of a Hairy Crab in a depression in the sand created by another species of ray. Rays use electromagnetic sense to detect them under the sand and catch them with their flat bodies and crushing feeding plates.
Pipefish numbers are down but there are still a few Wide-bodied Pipefish scattered in the seagrass. There seem to be lots of Pygmy Squid around at the moment, or maybe I’m just getting better at finding them. They tend to hunt just beneath the sargassum weed.
Also of note was a Cobbler, which had buried itself flat against the sand as concealment from predators during the day. There are also quite a lot of Black-margined Sea Slugs around at the moment. They are quite large now, so not too hard to find. They gaze on the bright green beds of Caleurpa.
