Scuba

After a long break from scuba diving I did two boat dives within a week. The first was to a site called Grootbank to do the first dive of my Advanced Course. This was a deep dive, meant to go down as close to 30m as possible. Michael and I dropped down and hit the reef at 21m, in pitch black. We expected a dim, dark dive but to not be able to see more than 30cm with a dive torch was horrid! Darkness in water is far worse than darkness on land I have since discovered, immediately my mind turned to all the creatures that we couldn't see but could probably see us. It was a short dive, but it was still good to be back in the water in scuba gear!

The second dive was just for fun. This time to a site called Jacobs Reef, where I have dived before. Unfortunately the visibility was again shocking and so we ended up surfacing quite quickly and moved to a shallower site, Blinders. It ended up being a pleasurable dive, it is always so wonderful to spend time hovering just about the reef looking at the corals, nudibranchs, fish and anemones, swaying with the current.

A happy diver I am.

Flower power

Another side project that I have been working on is looking at the pollination syndrome of Brunsvigia orientalis. Monica from Offshore Adventures has been running this project, supervised in part by Mark and I have been assisting with a lot of the fieldwork. Besides locating as many populations as possible and counting the number of flowers in each (sometimes ranging up to and over 1000 plants!) we have been bagging flowers and measuring nectar volume and concentration. We have also been doing pollinator observations, and it seems that sunbirds are the primary pollinators. We are hoping to publish the data we have collected, which would be awesome!

Amethyst Sunbird on a Brunsvigia plant.

Bagged flowers.

One of the fields we were working in, and our faithful fieldwork companion.

Full anther contact on a Greater Double-collared Sunbirds head.