Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
especially at night, his news was a bit disconcerting. I really think he
enjoyed telling me that and seeing my reaction.
Gear, food, and people were loaded on board and we had an un-
eventful three-day trip to the Cape—downhill, as they say, with the
swell coming from Alaska. Finally we pulled into the protected lee of
the spectacular tip of the long Baja California peninsula and anchored
close to Sheppard Rock, next to the submarine canyon. We made our
first night dive that same day after supper. As a way to find out what
fish were there, we had first stretched a small gill net between Shep-
pard Rock and the shore, a distance of about one hundred feet. We
climbed back on board and waited a half hour before going back down
to check the net. What we found taught us instantly that gill nets are
useless for collecting most aquarium fish.
Among the various fishes caught in the net there must have been
twenty beautiful Mexican goatfish (
Mulloidichthys dentatus
), which, in
their struggles to get free, were shedding their large scales like confetti.
There were also a couple of porcupinefish (
Diodon holocanthus
), an an-
imal that, when threatened, gulps water and inflates itself to the max-
imum. Of course, this defense strategy was quite useless in the present
circumstances; in fact, the fish were now virtually impossible to remove
without severe damage to them, us, or the net from their needle-sharp
spines. More interesting than what was in the net, however, was evi-
dence of what had gone right through it: a giant hole, large enough
for a VW Bug to drive through. All of a sudden we had visions of Sus
Kato's nocturnal sharks. We never did know what made that hole, but
whatever it was, it was really big, strong, and probably not something
we wanted to meet underwater at night!
Sus Kato's shark story and the presence of the
tiburoneros,
or itiner-
ant shark fishermen's camps, were concrete evidence that sharks were
definitely around. Yet, for whatever reason, I haven't seen a single shark
during the hundreds of night dives I've made over the twenty-five years
of collecting around Baja California. Other trips, 250 miles south at
the island of Socorro, in the o¤shore island group the Revillagigedos,
were to be a di¤erent story.
We learned a lot on this first collecting trip to the Cape, and it was
truly a luxury to have the
Five Bells
as our base of operations. A key mem-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search