PADI has launched their 2010 Go Pro Challenge. Follow the link to see last year’s winning submissions and the entry form.

Entry is simple: earn a PADI Pro rating (divemaster or above) in 2010 and submit a testimonial on why you love your life as a professional diver. This testimonial can be in written form, pictures, or video.

Prizes include iPods, jackets, and more. Submissions are due September 30, 2010. Good luck!

The ocean sunfish, or mola mola, as it is most often called, is a fascinating sea creature. Their odd appearance and enormous size makes them a popular attraction at aquariums around the world.

Physical description

Mola mola are big. Really big. In fact, it’s the heaviest known bony fish in the world. Sunfish, on average, weigh well over a ton (1,000 kg), and are almost 6 feet (2 m) in length. There have been sightings of mola mola over twice these sizes, though.

Sunfish look like some kind of freak accident. Their bodies resemble a lump of poorly molded clay with a fin on the top and bottom. The body is flattened vertically (imagine a vertical pancake).

The dorsal and anal fin are particularly large, make the entire fish as tall as it is long. It also has small, fan-shaped pectoral fins. The mola mola doesn’t have a proper caudal fin, and instead has a lumpy tail.

Geography and habitat

Sunfish live across the globe in tropical and temperate regions.

They can swim deep (up to 2,000 ft, or 600 m), and actually spend most of their lives at deep depths. This, combined with their presence mostly in open waters, makes them a rare sighting on dives. If you’ve ever seen one while scuba diving, consider yourself quite lucky.

Sunfish have an interesting behavior that is the source of their name. They will occasionally swim close to the surface and turn horizontal, exposing the large side of their body to the sun. This basking behavior is thought to “thermally charge” the fish in preparation for diving to deep, cold water.

Overall, very little is known about mola mola.

Further reading

Wikipedia
FishBase.org
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Photos by Ilse Reijs and Jan-Noud Hutten and Dan Hershman

Last week, California Governor Schwarzenegger signed the California artificial reef bill, laying the ground work for artificial reefing projects in California.

This bill limits the government’s liability for scuba diving and fishing accidents on artificial reefs. This was a huge impediment to laying artificial reefs in the California waters.

There are already a large number of artificial reefs off California, as most west coast divers know. Surprisingly, most of these are composed of quarry rock, rather than ships and barges. Others are made of light poles, pier pilings, concrete chimneys, and old streetcars. Here is a list of artificial reefs and coordinates, which also says what each are made of.

This initiative was pushed by California Ships to Reefs, so I expect newer reefs to be made of unsalvageable ships. While there are a few artificial reefs made of ships off California, like the Yukon in San Diego, they are definitely in the minority.

Not only do artificial wrecks provide shelter for fish, but they also provide a relatively safe wreck diving environment. They tend to be safer than genuine wrecks because all hazardous materials are removed prior to sinking.

Photo from yukonsite.wordpress.com

On Monday I posted seven links, a fun diversion to help you learn more about this blog and the man behind it. Mike at Diving Discoveries decided to play along, so here’s his seven links.

Want to swim in a swirling tornado of barracuda? Check out barracuda point, a dive site off of Sipadan Island, near Malaysia.

This beriscope / fishing rod could be a fun toy for those who prefer to stay on the boat.

The article is currently down, but I’ll post it anyway hoping that it comes alive again. This scuba instructor teaches students how to blow artistic bubbles underwater. Now that’s a specialty to get excited about!

Have a great Wednesday!

Oceana, the organization tasked with protecting the world’s oceans, has recently launched a new ad campaign to preserve bluefin tuna.

The 30-second spot features Adrian Grenier (Entourage, The Devil Wears Prada) free-diving with schools of bluefin tuna, while his voiceover informs us of their plight.

Eating sustainable seafood may sound like a full-time job, but it doesn’t have to be that difficult. True, there are a lot of middle-of-the-road fish—those where it would be better to avoid, but its not quite as imperative. If you’re just starting, ignore those for now. Focus on eliminating the fish truly in danger of being wiped out, or, in some cases, where the bycatch from them does incredible harm.

Bluefin tuna falls into this category. They mature a little slower than their tuna brethren, so are often caught before they have spawned. Recently, the gulf oil spill has threatened one of only two spawning sites for Atlantic bluefin tuna.

These are amazing fish, and make for really tasty sushi. I encourage you to lay off for a bit, let them repopulate and allow world agencies to devise a plan to catch them sustainably, then we can all enjoy them responsibly for many many years.

Last week I ran across a little something on the internet called the 7 link challenge, for bloggers. You must post 7 links to posts on your blog given different prompts. I decided to participate. Here goes:

1. Your first post. To get the blog off to a start, I wrote a post called 10 reasons to start diving now, for those on the fence about getting certified, or those who are certified and have just been sitting on their bums.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most. This is a tough one, since it’s obviously subjective. I really enjoyed writing about BCD overpressure relief valves. The article is the physics behind something you never think about, and I like physics.
3. A post which had a great discussion. This one is also hard to say, because so far there hasn’t been a lot of discussion on The Diving Blog (something I hope to change in the future!). One article that got some links and generated a mild ripple of discussion is good underwater photography: a key ingredient. This article talks about how you have to be a good diver before you can be a good underwater photographer.
4. A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you had written. Nothing immediately pops to mind, but this huge four part post on diving the Florida keys provides a lot of value, so I wish I had written it. Basically anything definitive that thoroughly covers a topic makes me jealous.
5. A post with a title that you are proud of. I wrote a post about dive etiquette called don’t make me wait. Not particularly clever or anything, but a little more forceful than most post titles here.
6. A post that you wish more people had read. I find the information in why do we feel the urge to breath? fascinating. That post probably gets a moderate amount of traffic, but it’s not in the top 10 or anything.
7. Your most visited post ever. This one’s easy, just look to the right at the Popular Posts widget. The most popular post was what makes something sink or float?, about what determines buoyancy. This has recently been overtaken by my post on emergency assistance plans. I am not surprised, because when this blog was just a tiny spark in my brain, I was doing my rescue diver course and looked on the internet for information about assistance plans, to no avail. Apparently there a lot of people out there doing the same.

I hope you enjoyed this little rundown of posts from The Diving Blog. I’d like your input, can you answer any of these questions about posts from The Diving Blog?

In Part I one of this series we covered the more common kinds of dolphins. These included the common dolphin, the bottlenose, the right whale, and the killer whale (orca).

Today brings us to the less common families. They’re not necessarily endangered, but these families tend to be more localized to specific regions.

Humpback dolphin

Surprise, surprise. Humpback dolphins are distinguished by the noticeable hump along their backs. Additionally, they have an elongated dorsal fin.

The location of the humpback depends on the individual species. The Pacific humpback dolphin has a range throughout the Indo-Pacific region around China and Australia. The Indian humpback can be found in the Indian Ocean and along the eastern coast of Africa. The Atlantic dolphin lives along the western coast of northern Africa.

Spotted dolphin

Spotted dolphins are found in tropical and temperate climates across the globe. As usual, individual species are distinguished by their region. These include the Atlantic, spinner, and the pantropical spotted dolphins. The striped dolphin counts itself as a member of the spotted family (go figure).

Spotted dolphins are born spotless, and gradually develop spots as they get older. The family is sometimes also called bridled dolphins.

Tucuxi dolphin

The Tucuxi (pronounced “too-koo-shi”) is found along the eastern coast of South America and along the Amazon River basin. Despite this river habitat, they are classified as an oceanic dolphin.

Although they are in separate dolphin genera, Tucuxi strongly resemble the bottlenose dolphin, but maybe slightly smaller. They live in small pods of 10-15 dolphins and are thought to be quite active, like the bottlenose, often breaching out of the water.

Commerson’s, Chilean, Haviside’s, and Hector’s dolphin

These four species are classified into the same genus (cephalorhynchus, for you taxonomists out there). They are very similar physically, with small blunt noses and white patches.

Commerson’s is found near the southern tip of South America, Chilean along the western coast of South America, Haviside’s along the South African coast, Hector’s dolphin is found only in New Zealand.

For those keeping count, that’s 8 genera, out of 17. Keep an eye out in the future for a Part III.

Sport Chalet, the retail store, is holding a scuba treasure hunt.

They have planted three gold-painted bars somewhere in the ocean, and are periodically leaving clues as to their location. Retrieve a bar and bring it to your nearest Sport Chalet and receive a $5,000, $3,000, or $1,000 gift card.

The contents began Monday, July 12, and ends on the 25th of July, so I imagine clues will begin getting more explicit. Here’s an example clue:

A treasure can be found south of where the Adriatic sunk in 1930.

Clue #2 says the largest ocean holds the treasure, so this contest might only be accessible to U.S. west coast divers.

Happy hunting!