Blue Heron Bridge
Here are a few more favorite Blennywatcher images from 2013. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will already have seen most of our favorite images, but some didn’t make into a post and others were published earlier this year in Alert Diver, Scuba Diving or Wetpixel. So, we’re ringing in the New Year with a few more photos from 2013, starting with this Anchor Tuskfish displaying quite a mouthful of teeth. The menacing look is quite … Read more
Ned just posted a lot of his images from the past few years’ dives at the Blue Heron Bridge in Riviera Beach Florida over on our other blog, MarineLifeBlog. It includes several juvenile fishes, so I thought I’d post a couple of them, along with photos of what they look like as adults. Some juvenile fishes look just like miniature versions of the adults; the Great Barracuda and Bandtail Puffer come to mind. Others, like many damselfishes and angelfishes, look … Read more
Universal Truth of Blenny Watching #1: The desirability of the blenny is inversely proportional to the conditions in which one must dive to see/photograph it. Longhorn Blenny? High on our list and took two 90-minute dives in surge to get the shots (see last year’s post here). A blenny with eggs? Seaweed blennies are pretty common in Florida, but the Seaweed Blenny with eggs was in 72-degree water with 3-foot visibility (see that post here). So why would I even … Read more
We just had three great days of diving at the Blue Heron Bridge having planned our trip to head home after this morning’s dive, before the Memorial Day holiday weekend craziness started. But we didn’t expect the craziness to start with an overzealous law enforcement officer (accompanied by a TV cameraman) whose boat snagged Eric’s dive flag in her effort to bust Ned, because his dive flag was not flying fully upright. A sagging flag is apparently an extremely dangerous infraction, which … Read more
This image of spawning Striated Frogfish is not new. We wrote about our 2009 Blue Heron Bridge adventure in Alert Diver Magazine in an article we called “Caught in the Act” (you can click here to read it online). We were lucky to get the photos and video – it was a combination of being in the right place at the right time and recognizing what was about to happen. I’m posting it here because I just created a Blennywatcher video channel … Read more
The email came on a Friday morning two weeks ago. It was a chatty note from our friend Judy, one of the Blue Heron Bridge Mucksters. “Right now we are seeing seaweed blennies with eggs, cardinal fish with eggs, and seahorses.” Oh, Oh, Oh! Blennies with eggs have been on my hit list forever. I spent many dives this year in Dominica, Bonaire and at the Bridge looking for looking for Redlip (Ophioblennius macclurei) or Seaweed (Parablennius marmoreus) blenny males, … Read more
Since this summer’s launch of Blenny Week, we have been on the go! Some planned and several unforeseen (but necessary) road trips have kept us running. Three short trips were all we could manage to Riviera Beach’s famous Blue Heron Bridge. We owe much of our success there to the local crowd, known to some as the Mucksters (a subset of whom are also known as the Ladies of the Muck), who dive the area every week and share their … Read more