Underwater Photo of the Week

Hi Gang!

I suppose a lot of underwater photographers have a few animals on their list of creatures they want to photograph that somehow manage to elude them. This, despite the fact that many others have filmed their desired subjects on the same trips. But somehow, we just never seem to be in the right place at the right time. All you can do is tip your cap to the other photographer, and enjoy their success.

For many years sea snakes and sea kraits were among my list of creatures that always seemed to elude me. I had filmed several species on numerous occasions back in the days when I was making documentary films, but for reasons I can not explain every time I picked up a still camera the sea snakes and sea kraits seemed to vanish.

As a quick point of clarification, sea snakes and sea kraits are described in different taxonomic families. While there are several differences between the two groups, perhaps the most significant distinguishing factor is that sea kraits routinely crawl out of the sea and go onto land to lay eggs and digest food. Sea snakes, on the other hand, routinely live their entire life without ever touching land.

In any case, both groups have proven to be very elusive to my still cameras over the years. But that finally changed during my recent trip to far eastern Indonesia aboard the luxurious liveaboard Damai Two. On that trip I enjoyed a wonderful opportunity to photograph Chinese sea kraits (aka black-banded sea kraits), Laticauda semifasciata, at Manuk Island in the Banda Sea.

Interestingly, Manuk is a relatively small island, and I was diving in the same general geographic area for 4 weeks. While others saw two or three sea kraits on some of our other dives I never did. But at Manuk Island, on two dives, I saw so many sea kraits that I could not keep track of all of them. My best guess is that I saw well over one hundred, but it is hard to know how many times I saw the same snake twice, or three times, or even ten times. What I can tell you is that there were sea kraits all over the place, and often when I was trying to photograph one I had another sea krait poking its nose at my strobes or fins. No doubt about, the place was sea krait crazy!

As is the case with other sea kraits and sea snakes, the Chinese sea krait is too slow to catch fish by out swimming them. So, its strategy is to capture fishes that are hiding in the recesses of the reef. The krait is highly venomous, and its bite is reputed to be 10 times as potent as that of a cobra.

Clearly, it is a good thing for divers that sea kraits and sea snakes are not at all aggressive toward divers. Of course, it is one thing to have read such a thing, and a bit of another to have them bumping into you as they investigate you and your equipment while you are trying to photograph one.

I captured this week’s POTW with a Canon 10-22 mm zoom lens mounted on a Canon 7D camera. I think that to some degree, even though there were so many sea kraits all around me, I was lucky to get this shot. In fact, on the following dive I changed lenses, and an image I captured on that dive will be the focus of next week’s POTW.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW!

See you next week,

Marty