Journal archives for January 2018

January 1, 2018

Swimming with sharks

I went for my first swim with my son at Goseberry Flat, Great Barrier Island on the 31st of Dec 2017. We immediately noticed a lot of eagle rays, at most we might see one eagle ray every 50 meters (at other beaches) but we were seeing at least one every 10 meters here. The rays were also harder to photograph than usual (moving away from us). After a small school of silver trevally joined us we were quite impressed with the sea life at this beach!

We finished our swim and were told by a drone operator on the beach that there was a school of 20 or so hammerhead sharks swimming only meters from us. I went straight back out to look for tham but they had moved on. Here is the drone footage on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/sarah.judkins.12/videos/10156927768523056/

Posted on January 1, 2018 11:44 PM by shaun-lee shaun-lee | 4 observations | 0 comments | Leave a comment

January 29, 2018

Pataua mussel bed

I went for a snorkel in the Pataua Estuary (North East of Whangarei) to look for a soft sediment intertidal mussel bed seen in 2016. Soft sediment mussel beds are quite interesting as they were a dominant habitat in the Hauraki Gulf but were over fished and are now functionally extinct.

First we asked a local about the mussels. She said they were gone now (cleaned out by school camps who took them when they were quite small) but that we might find some in the channel. We spent hours in the water, mostly because it was so clear (no mud, just sand shell and rock substrate). We investigated the channel from the bridge to the mouth of the estuary. This covered the area they were reported in 2016 which I think is visible in Google Earth (view historical imagery). We just found dead mussel shell but there were a few juveniles growing in coralline (which is interesting) and attached to pebbles.

The estuary is awesome, we saw so much cool stuff (below). We only saw one blue mussel and a few horse mussels. I hope they get the green-lipped mussel bed back, in the meantime the octopus will have to do with pipi.

Posted on January 29, 2018 03:59 AM by shaun-lee shaun-lee | 13 observations | 0 comments | Leave a comment