Two Weeks with the Red Sea

The Obeamyway Peninsula. A remote and fascinating region teeming with marine life. We chose these mysterious waters as the Belafonte's next stop.

For those of you that missed the reference, it's from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and it's amazing. The movie is a somewhat bluntly satirical postmortem celebration of the life and times of Jacques Yves Cousteau, that beloved and famous French oceanographer & SCUBA co-inventor. And it's the sort of nostalgic scientific enjoyment I was experiencing daily on our vessel. Heck, we even brought glocks (replicae, of course).

We visited each of the sites on the map below on a cruise from North to South and back again in the Saudi Arabian Red Sea...


I'm not sure how to share this trip with you. To share a portion of what I wrote while on the cruise, "Memories & research cruises don't go well together; think blur with bright patches; like a Jackson Pollock with the occasional chartreuse smear. Its very anachronistic, just a collection of amazing moments with shady/fuzzy links between them (i.e. was the white tip @ Canyon? Or was it before the sea turtle?). The other [researchers on the boat] must just enjoy it, & end up with the data they need... no problem... sort of a 'surprise, you have samples to work with [back in the lab]' kind of memory... Though it was all planned out beforehand, like a composed orchestra, it cannot be reconstructed however meticulously by the listener from a single performance... I guess we just enjoy it... Learn what lessons you can, here & there..."




My thoughts on paper sway like the swell of the sea, and my apologies if they don't make sense. If we meet in person and drink beer together in the future and talk about this trip, you and I, I can show you some photos and tell you that this trip was key for my experience at KAUST. It has been the first reassurance that KAUST could be a good place for me to do research, and that the researcher I want to work with is an incredibly cool person.


I learned more on this trip about the current research techniques in understanding the life histories of reef fishes - what they do, why, where they go, where they're from, where they grew up, why they only eat this coral, who they're friends with... I learned how to identify a few dozen more species of reef animals (mostly fish) in this part of the world, including some endemic (Red Sea only) species... I learned how to throw a cast net, how to keep cuts and scratches taped up to keep them from getting worse even after hours in the sea, how to cut out the sagittal otolith bones from the neurocraniums of Actinopterygiian fishes, how to catch & clip clownfish, and how to play bananagrams.


[Above, cool photo Justin took of Red Sea ghost crab, an endemic sp. w/cool eyes!]

But it was not some drift off into wonderland, some heralded exclusive for a few lucky scientists to discuss life and love and coral reefs. In fact, there were only a few in depth conversations I had over the two weeks - with the cool researcher/PI/boss regarding what I was interested in & what I thought reef conservation needed and where I wanted to go with it; with a last-year WHOI PhD student regarding fish life history, grad school, otoliths and girlfriends; with cool researcher's assistant about conservation, hippies, communal farming and the reefs of Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea... Most days consisted of three good Filipino-cooked meals, lots of water to drink, several hours of diving and catching, measuring and clipping the fins of spunky clownfish - then back on the boat for data recording, relaxing, planning the next cruise location, playing guitar, watching a movie, swimming in the bioluminescent waters off the boat at night, or catching little fish from the transom...




So, since I told myself to keep these post short, and to honor the anachronism and mire of the memories of the voyage that ended nearly a month ago, I'll just share a few random excerpts from the journal and put up a few more pictures. Ask me more in December over a nice winter warmer while the snow falls outside, far from the reefs.



Excerpt from 10/4/09
"In bed, just thought how funny would it be to tell a total stranger... about the day's activities? Here I am on a boat snug-as-a-bug reading a book about Red Sea marine life; rather, studying and memorizing fish species... wondering about their diets, their availability in the aquarium trade, their captive care... their ease of capture, their abundance on reefs, their otoliths, their population structure and dynamics... why do I have to pick one question? Do I? & why must it be "relevant"? to what need it be "relevant"? And how funny would any of this be to someone else...




Excerpt from 10/6/09
"We even did a night dive. Not enough lights for all of us, but nearly full moon so it bright enough... Just to play in sand w/bioluminescent dinoflagellates was enough for me. No responsibilities, just play - & night dive the best time to do so on a reef. You feel like a member of the club, unified, your secret sea home, a place to play & sleep and do handstands & eat coral & fight eels & chew lil reef shrimp & grunt at competing males... Mike even brought some of our dead fish to try to get sharks in, but we never did... I was worried at first, but it's really the live & inured fish that get sharks excited... otherwise they're too scared to come just cuz you smell like fish... Mike DID put two on the reef before we left though & they were gone when we got back..." [Photos are lionfish hunting over reef at night, scorpionfish perched on coral branches, and octopus tucked down inside a coral]




Excerpt from 10/9/09
"Up @ 11 this morning [late] cuz sat phone peaches last night for ~15 mins [after all the night's activities]. There were squid off the stern last night; five, in a line next to each other - probably the reef squid Sepioteuthis lessioniana - short lifespans, mature in ten months!" [I was thinking about how she was in a car with friends during the call, going out, to an opera? And I'm staring at squid at like 3 am rocking over the reef... The photo I posted below is one I took of Erin and I if we lived as reef fish buddies... I thought of this immediately when I saw the juvenile goatfish and the juvenile bird wrasse hanging out together. Of course, Erin's the bird wrasse (above) and I'm the goatfish (below)... & I know they're juveniles, but like my sister said, we really like to play together...]



Excerpt from 10/11/09
"An unbelievable evening - am I making it up? Sammy [our Filipino cook] made me a cake, w/FROSTING, & my own chicken for dinner!" [The chicken had a flag stuck in it that said "Happy 21st B-Day NOAH," and all of this was after a dusk dive where I "found" an angelfish-shaped card made from underwater paper with everyone's signature on it down on the reef...]




So what did I do when I got back to shore, two weeks of classes to catch up on, and three make-up tests?
Tyler: Dude, do you want to go diving?
Noah: Uhm, I have this one weekend to catch up on tests and work and yadda yadda and I just did a lot of diving...
Tyler: Soooo.....
Noah: Well, yeah, okay.