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Caribbean Reef Sharks, Cuba
Jan. 22nd, 2019 04:31 pm
Yes, I still have a ton of video I haven't edited from the diving trip to Cuba last year. I've been busy! But I'm making a start again...
The Caribbean reef sharks at the Gardens of the Queen in Cuba weren't shy. Often they were curious creatures who meandered by for a closer look. There were plenty of them around too - by the third day of diving, I'd stopped filming every shark I saw. Unheard of!
The inhabitants of the Gardens of the Queen are entirely protected, with the exception of invasive species, like the lionfish. So our guides did a spot of lionfish spearfishing, and the aroma of fish blood completely changed the behaviour of the sharks - suddenly they were faster, searching sharks.
Lionfish have no natural predators in the Caribbean, but a program in the Cayman Islands has successfully been training groupers to eat them. So we fed lionfish to anything that looked interested - the yellowtail snappers were happy to munch on lionfish innards, and so were the sharks...
The divers had our own lionfish dinner back on the boat too, although we had ours cooked first. As usual, watch in HD, although even then some of the youtube encoding is making me cry. Apparently the seagrass is far too much for it to cope with....
The Caribbean reef sharks at the Gardens of the Queen in Cuba weren't shy. Often they were curious creatures who meandered by for a closer look. There were plenty of them around too - by the third day of diving, I'd stopped filming every shark I saw. Unheard of!
The inhabitants of the Gardens of the Queen are entirely protected, with the exception of invasive species, like the lionfish. So our guides did a spot of lionfish spearfishing, and the aroma of fish blood completely changed the behaviour of the sharks - suddenly they were faster, searching sharks.
Lionfish have no natural predators in the Caribbean, but a program in the Cayman Islands has successfully been training groupers to eat them. So we fed lionfish to anything that looked interested - the yellowtail snappers were happy to munch on lionfish innards, and so were the sharks...
The divers had our own lionfish dinner back on the boat too, although we had ours cooked first. As usual, watch in HD, although even then some of the youtube encoding is making me cry. Apparently the seagrass is far too much for it to cope with....
