finding stuff to see on dives

[uncfnp]

It's hard to explain but I find I have to see something before I SEE something. Finding the first of any small or well camouflaged sealife is the hardest. Finding my first scorpionfish was a bear but now I know what to look for. The same for my first seahorse, yellow headed jaw fish and garden eels. You have to learn how to see. And then how to look.

And don't just look down at the reef. Occasionally look up as well and to the sides and even overhead. You never know what might be swimming past you...

 

[driftwood]

On a day dive I always take a light with a narrow beam. This is my favorite, Diving Diver Scuba CREE XM L T6 LED 18650 Flashlight | eBay Once you get the batteries and charger, figure you have spent $75. Most people don't realize how much color they are missing on day dives and the hotspot tends to focus your mind on a spot.

 

[TSandM]

You've gotten some good suggestions for technique, and for boning up on information on what you might expect to see.

I'm going to add that one of the best enrichment things you can do is try to hook up with someone who is familiar with the sites you are diving, and knows the critters, and can point them out to you. I was lucky enough to do a whole bunch of diving early in my career with NW Grateful Diver. He knew the sites and the animals. One day, he found a small octopus under a kelp leaf. I asked him, "How on earth did you know that was there?" And he said, "That kelp leaf wasn't moving with the water the way the others were, so I knew there was something under it." Nowadays, I can do the same thing, but it took a while to learn, and I got to watch somebody who was really good at it.

 

[supergaijin]

Just to add to the above-

Predators like barracuda, jacks, tuna etc. never stop swimming. They're constantly on the move (unless being cleaned).

When we dive, if we act like a predator (constantly in motion) the fish sense our presence as we move in the water and freeze. Octopus are great at doing this. So remember to stop. Find a sweet spot on the reef where things are happening and stop. Look around for a good few minutes.

Fish have a 'gentleman's agreement' in that everyone is fair game for being lunch until they call 'Time Out' and stop on the reef and get cleaned by wrasse or other cleaners. Then they're 'out of the game'. If we mimic this approach we can approach fish that would otherwise be too afraid of us.

The underwater world, the inhabitants and the environment are a bit like ours (if you take enough LSD). City centers are where you find the most entertainment- the colour and vibrant life. This is like certain areas of reef which have an interesting topography: small cracks, shaded areas, vertical chimneys etc.

The opposite of this are the areas like sandy plains, seagrass fields, lagoon bottoms etc. This is like being in Idaho or Nebraska- on first look everything is very, very same-looking and monotonous, the houses are similar and pretty boring. But if you stop to peek in the windows you'll find the weirdest of the weirdest animals that the world can create.

Happy hunting

 

[Quero]

What a great question, and what a great set of responses! When people ask me, "How did you ever spot that?" because so much marine life hides in plain sight, so to speak, (t's right there, but our eyes just slide past as if they were invisible), I tend to say that it's pattern recognition. It's sort of what uncfnp was saying (if I understood her correctly) in post #11. That scorpionfish she mentioned, for example, typically has very distinctive arc-shaped pectoral fins on which it rests. The rock or coral or wreck or whatever it's perched on doesn't naturally have that clear and perfect curve, so when I see it, I know it doesn't fit the pattern I think of as "rock" or "coral" or "wreck". In other words, I often look for the "odd man out" sorts of patterns--the black stick lying on the sand is often the tail of a ray, one bit of torn sea grass swaying in a surge might make sense, but two of them together is often a pair of ghost pipefish, etc.

 

[CT Sean]

I agree with the "slow down" from everyone else.

I think half the battle is knowing what you are looking for. Reading through a critter ID book for the area you're diving should help, even better is diving with someone who can actually show you the local critters. Then you'll gradually get better at it.

This is a big one for me. Knowing what I'm looking has made quite a difference. When all I saw was "a bunch of fish" , I didn't see much. Now that I can see trumpet fish, grunts, and snapper and cowfish, french angelfish, grey angelfish, etc... I feel like I see a lot more.

 

[ajduplessis]

The slow down thing is already well covered and will make a huge difference in your diving.

Additionally you can try (rent or borrow) regs with exhaust tees/bubble deflectors. This made a huge difference for me wrt to "clearing" up my view.

 

[Lorenzoid]

I think my problem early on was that I was simply overwhelmed by the abundance of marine life around me, so I found myself looking this way and that without ever knowing what I was looking at or being able to remember what I saw. To address this, in addition to simply buying and reading a Fish ID book, I found it helpful to focus my reading before a dive on just two or three animals that were common there, and then making a point to search for them. On later dives, I would target another couple of animals I wasn't familiar with, and so on. It seems that when I'm looking for something specific, I am better able to find it than if I'm just looking around at everything in hopes of finding something particularly interesting. Focusing was the key that first helped me open my eyes. Heck, I still use this technique, though the animals I look for are increasingly the less common ones.

 

[Diver0001]

You can slow down and still not see anything.

Going slow might be necessary to free up some attention and allow yourself more time to absorb what you're seeing but if you're diving completely randomly then what you will see is a completely random collections of things. That can be fun and entertaining, but I think the op was looking for a less random approach.

What I often do with my regular buddy is decide ahead of time what we want to look for. For example, we might go diving in the local lake and decide to look for baby pike hiding in the weeds. That not only gives us focus on where to go (navigation plan) but what to look for (activity plan) and gives us some coordination.... two people doing the same thing together.

An example of how well this can work is how it panned out for us in Egypt. I initially found Egypt daunting because there is so much more to see than where I normally dive. So we decided to focus our attention on smaller goals.... on dive 1 we decided to go look for octopus... and found them. Next night we decided to look for cuttlefish... and found them.... the night after that we decided to look for spanish dancers.... and found them (ok.. .one).... on another dive we decided to look for squid in the shallows... and found them..... on another dive we looked for whitetips laying under table corals and found them... or go look for clown fish... etc etc.

The point of this being that where you can find cuttlefish is NOT where you can find squid and it's not where you can find octopus or sharks or clownfish or whatever else... Everything has it's own little niche. Working like this you have to learn (by trying) a little bit about the habitat of whatever it is you're looking for and by focusing your effort like this, you have a much better chance of actually finding what you want to find.... and it leaves other goals open for other dives, which keeps your diving fresh and interesting.... Futhermore you can get better and better at it over time. At this point if we know what we're looking for, especially resident species, then it's a rare day that we don't actually see it.

Anyway, this works for me and after 27 years I'm still finding new goals and making new discoveries.

R..

 

[uncfnp]

What a great question, and what a great set of responses! When people ask me, "How did you ever spot that?" because so much marine life hides in plain sight, so to speak, (t's right there, but our eyes just slide past as if they were invisible), I tend to say that it's pattern recognition. It's sort of what uncfnp was saying (if I understood her correctly) in post #11. That scorpionfish she mentioned, for example, typically has very distinctive arc-shaped pectoral fins on which it rests. The rock or coral or wreck or whatever it's perched on doesn't naturally have that clear and perfect curve, so when I see it, I know it doesn't fit the pattern I think of as "rock" or "coral" or "wreck". In other words, I often look for the "odd man out" sorts of patterns--the black stick lying on the sand is often the tail of a ray, one bit of torn sea grass swaying in a surge might make sense, but two of them together is often a pair of ghost pipefish, etc.

Thanks Quero. You explained it much better than I. Excellent photo examples as well.