Press ENTER to search, ESC to clear

Best Places to Dive: Cenote Dos Ojos, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Diver Matt B. at Greater Cleveland Aquarium.A shade over 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide meteor came screaming out of the heavens at 12 miles per second and a 60-degree angle to the surface of the Earth, which is kind of a worst-case scenario angle in terms of plunging chunks of space rock. It absolutely pulverized the impact zone with the force of a 100 million megaton bomb, creating tsunamis hundreds of feet high and flinging rocks half a continent away. For non-avian dinosaurs, the impact marked the end of an era. Literally. This is where the Mesozoic Era ended, and the Cenozoic began—the infamous K-T Extinction that eliminated roughly 80 percent of all species on the planet.

We know this hurtling chunk of death as the Chicxulub Meteor, named after the Mexican town at the center of its crater, which lies at the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula along the Gulf of Mexico. The dinosaurs may have nothing to recommend the Chicxulub Meteor, but humans have reaped the benefits; the Cenozoic kicked off the “Age of Mammals” where Homo sapiens flourished.

The Yucatan Peninsula, that large thrust of land that sticks out northeast from Central America and divides the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea, has a truly unique geology. It is a flat slab of limestone with 1,000 miles of shoreline that is completely devoid of surface water. There are no rivers, bridges or lakes in northern Yucatan. Instead, brittle limestone cracks and fissures drain rainwater from the surface into a vast underground river system that stretches for hundreds of miles.

Cenotes, or sinkholes, dot the surface and provide access to the underground waterways. The ancient Mayan civilization relied on cenotes for potable water and regarded them as sacred wells, building cities, like Chichen Itza, around these gateways to the underworld and placing offerings to the gods in them, occasionally in the form of human sacrifices.

Two of our staff divers, Matthew Ballish and Stephanie Quinn, have journeyed to the popular Dos Ojos Cenote to explore what lies beneath. Dos Ojos, from the Spanish “Two Eyes,” is north of Tulum in the state of Quintana Roo and refers to a pair of cenotes (blue eye and black eye) that connect into a large cavern below. Snorkelers can swim in the crystal-clear water at the surface, while scuba divers follow two lines (known as the “Barbie Line” and the “Bat Cave”) through pitch black tunnels studded with stalagmites and stalactites.

Matthew, who has been the Greater Cleveland Aquarium Assistant Dive Safety Coordinator for eight years and has more than 600 dives in his 36 years of experience, was drawn to Dos Ojos because of its proximity to the cities along the Riviera Maya, allowing him easy access while on vacation to a great dive spot. Though there are more than 6,000 cenotes across the Yucatan Peninsula, Stephanie and her husband found that the wealth of information available about Dos Ojos and the easy access made it an ideal spot to explore these ancient gateways.

Formal exploration of Dos Ojos began recently in 1987, and in 2018 an access point was found to the much larger Sistema Sac Actum, making the entire system the longest underwater cave system in the world.

Free of particulate matter as the rainwater filters through the limestone, the waters of the cenotes are amazingly clear and their temperature stays a constant 77° F year-round. The depth isn’t more than 33 feet in the cavern, and though there are few fish, divers will find signs of life at the aptly named “Bat Cave.”

“Underwater, you’ll see pieces of fruit tossed aside by the bats,” Matthew remembers. “When you surface to look at the bats above your head, you’ll be happy you have a mask on . . . the odor is powerful.”

 

Cenote Dos Ojos  is the third in our weekly series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Stay tuned for the rest of our list or suggest somewhere new we might want to explore.

 

 –Ray D.

 

Best Places to Dive: Neptune Memorial Reef, Key Biscayne, Miami, Florida

Diver Damon at Greater Cleveland Aquarium.When Greater Cleveland Aquarium Diver Damon Johnson swam with his first eagle ray in the Atlantic Ocean a few years ago, it was at one of the more unusual dive sites in the world. Neptune Memorial Reef, which will be the largest man-made reef in the ocean once it’s completed, offers people an opportunity to mix the cremated remains of their loved ones into the cement structures that make up the reef.

Just over three miles off the Atlantic Coast of Key Biscayne (south of Miami, Florida), and 40 feet underwater, plans for Neptune Memorial Reef show it eventually covering 16 acres of ocean floor and including more than 250,000 memorials to both humans and their beloved pets. It already has at least one famous resident—celebrity chef Julia Child.

Although far from finished, the reef is already transforming the underwater environment. The bases, pillars and arches are engineered to support marine life in all its forms. Coral and other benthic animals grow on the texture of the base and pillars, and the arches have holes where prey animals can hide from predators. A recent survey showed hundreds of species including bluehead wrasse, sergeant majors, barracudas and pufferfishes. Crabs, lobsters and sea urchins can be found in the crevices and of course, as Damon and his father discovered, divers might even find a majestic eagle ray, which can have a wingspan up to ten feet. The bevy of life swimming amongst the cremated remains is perhaps perfectly summarized by Neptune’s motto “creating life, after life.”

 Damon has been diving since 2019. His father got certified soon after and they found that they enjoyed diving the warm, turquoise South Florida waters together. He and his father are now both certified advanced divers and look forward to diving Dubai in the near future.

Neptune Memorial Reef is the second in our weekly series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Stay tuned for the rest of our list or suggest somewhere new we might want to explore.

 

-Ray D.

 

 

 

 

Best Places to Dive: Forfar Field Station, Andros Island, Bahamas

Diver Steph Q with a sand tiger shark at the Aquarium.We dive for a variety of reasons. To commune with nature, to unwind, to explore. Our “pale blue dot,” as astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan pointed out, is just a “very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” but perhaps by diving in we can learn to better appreciate that fragile ecosystem largely invisible to us as we commute between school, work and the grocery store in our busy daily lives.

Greater Cleveland Aquarium diver Stephanie Quinn took a formal approach to learning about our dot when she enrolled in a study abroad program during her senior year at Ohio University. Stephanie and her future husband spent a week at the Forfar Field Station, an educational and scientific non-profit organization that has served as a resource to over 50,000 thousand students ranging from middle school to graduate students and researchers. Most field study trips last a week and involve groups of 10-45 students with a focus on marine science, geology, botany, climate change or other scientific fields including social science. Imagine a classroom along the shoreline where students put their learning to the test by plunging into their environment.

“Forfar Field Station is a rustic former dive resort nestled in a beachfront coconut grove on the east coast of Andros Island,” according to their website. The largest of the Bahamian islands, Andros is host to rich diving opportunities for the students, including “coral reefs, offshore cays, sea grass beds, sandbars, blue holes, subtropical terrestrial habitats, Bahamian settlements and more.” The waters nearby are filled with colorful reef fish, including blue tang, angelfish, parrotfish and butterflyfish.

“It was the best diving,” Stephanie recalls. “Crystal clear water. Great biodiversity. We dove both there (Forfar Field Station) and Small Hope Bay during our study abroad. We then went back to Small Hope Bay for our honeymoon.”

Stephanie joined the Aquarium’s dive team in 2015 and has been a certified diver for 22 years. She lost her logbook, but estimates she has roughly 75 dives outside of the Aquarium. According to Aquarium Assistant Dive Safety Coordinator Matthew Ballish, she has more than 1350 dives in the habitats here.

Sagan, in his well-known speech, said that astronomy was a humbling experience. “To me,” he said, “it underscores our responsibility…to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” These words were meant for the study of the stars but could apply just as well to those that look under the sea.

Forfar Field Station is the first in our weekly series of the Aquarium dive team’s favorite dive locations. Stay tuned for the rest of our list or share your favorite place to dive with us.

– Ray D.

Best Places to Dive? We Know a Few

Diver Ray Danner.Scuba diving and Cleveland, Ohio . . . sort of go together like peanut butter and monkey wrenches, right? I challenge you to find one of those “101 Places to Dive Before You Die” books with a cover that isn’t turquoise, tropical and filled with colorful reef fish. And yet Cleveland has its own extensive dive community. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, has hundreds of shipwrecks to explore and is serviced by several dive shops that teach classes, sell gear, and organize trips all over the world. Northeast Ohio is home to around 4.5 million people and an untold amount of scuba divers who love to explore the waters in their own backyard as well as adventure to distant places to see what there is to see in the 70% of our planet that is underwater.

“What is your favorite place to dive?” is usually the first question posed to a diver. Could there be a better place to ask that question than of the staff at Greater Cleveland Aquarium? Not to toot our own horn, but we pack a ton of dive experience into the historic Powerhouse.

The Aquarium currently has 25 divers on staff; that’s not just the dedicated dive team members but also diver-certified aquarists, Life Support Systems staff and some of the Guest Experience folks regularly answering your animal questions. The numbers are dizzying. We did 1,265 dives in 2022 totaling 99,162 minutes. That’s almost 69 days or 10 weeks underwater. We could have watched Avatar: The Way of Water 5,204 times last year!

The Aquarium team has logged 22,246 dives since the downtown venue’s doors first opened in 2012 through the end of 2022, and we have well over 300 already this year. In fact, there’s a good chance that someone is underwater at the Aquarium as you read this blog post.

Best places to dive? Yeah, we have a few. I asked around and started a list. What follows will be a series of ten dive locations around the world as recommended by our team. Some are tropical, some feature shipwrecks and one is even under ice.

We hope that the discussion stirs a passion in everyone to explore the world while you can. There’s so much to experience and we love to talk about all the curiosities we’ve seen underwater. I think I speak for all the staff here when I say that we advocate for the protection of the species and environments that we’ve seen firsthand and feel there’s no better way to learn and love what’s out there than diving in and encountering it, face-to-face. I’ve been diving since 2017 and have been a Greater Cleveland Aquarium diver since 2018. I have more than 1,000 dives here and 65 or so out in the world, including the Florida Keys, Bahamas, Honduras, Niagara River, Tobermory and Greece.

So, if you see someone at the Aquarium and you’re curious, don’t be shy. We love to talk diving and follow this blog series to add some of our recommendations to your “must-experience list.”

-Ray D.

An Underwater Twist On Pumpkin Carving with @CLEAquarium

If you think carving a prize-winning pumpkin is difficult, try doing it underwater. Greater Cleveland Aquarium Dive Safety Coordinator Halle M. explains what makes carving underwater such a challenge and why it’s still so much fun. (Special thanks to Professional Diving Resources, who hosted the competition!)

The underwater pumpkin carving event you see here was held in Ohio at a local quarry called White Star Quarry. It’s a place where local divers often go for training and to freshen up their recreational SCUBA skills. It has a platform, which makes it really convenient for doing pumpkin carving underwater.

So, how does underwater carving work? Our divers are allowed to scoop out their pumpkins and open their tops before they enter the water. Once they’ve entered the water though, if they or their pumpkins surface they have to get out. Divers have a maximum of 2 hours to complete their carving. When everyone is finished, the jack-o-lanterns are displayed, judged and winners are selected.  

In this video, we’re on an underwater platform at a depth of 15 feet. We’re sitting/kneeling/lying on that platform to carve. We don’t want to sit or kneel on the bottom of the quarry because it would stir up the silt and make it difficult to see anything.  

Carving underwater is a challenge. Just imagine you’re one of us. You’re diving. You have your wetsuit, your mask, all of your equipment, weights and a SCUBA cylinder. You also have a pumpkin that’s constantly trying to float away from you and you’re using a big dive knife to try to to cut small details into a gourd. It definitely takes a lot of patience and attention to detail to do a good job.

I’ve been doing this for the last 5 or 6 years and I’ve learned a few things. My first tip is to bring a lot of extra weights and lot of warm wetsuit layers because it gets quite cold when you’re sitting still underwater. (This year was particularly cold. The air was 35 degrees when we arrived, but luckily the water was much warmer . . . 65 degrees.) It’s also really important to go in with a plan, to not stay to long and to pay close attention to what you’re doing. That all makes underwater carving with all its challenges a bit easier.

There were around 30 pumpkin carvers at the Quarry and 15 of those were associated with the Greater Cleveland Aquarium in some way. We brought along a few new participants to competing this year. Jamil and Damon had never done anything like this before but I think they enjoyed the challenge. Some of the pumpkins that our team created included traditional jack-o-lanterns, a walrus, a battery charge sign, a turtle, a ship and some goofy faces. The winner of the entire event had carved a SCUBA diver carved into their pumpkin, which clearly is an audience pleaser with this group. Two people who came from the Aquarium group placed 2nd and 3rd with their pumpkins. Crystal carved a ship being attacked by a squid and Taylor carved tortoise or a turtle. They were really awesome pumpkin designs and they worked very hard to bring them designs to life.

Events like this really do help to create camaraderie and to bring new divers into the fold. It’s a lot of good, old-fashioned fun and way to engage with diving and your friends that’s a little atypical. Here at the Aquarium we have divers in the water every day. A number of them got their start at White Star Quarry. If you’re interested learning to dive, check out Professional Diving Resources. Maybe next year you can carve pumpkins with us!

Author: Halle M.

Coral Reefs and Sunscreen

What can I do, here in Ohio to help protect the coral reefs thousands of miles away? The answer may surprise you. There are numerous ways YOUR individual actions can either hurt or help coral reefs around the world. One such action is the selection of your sunscreen! The sunscreen you have at home may contain chemicals that are extremely dangerous for coral reefs.

Image source: http://rethinkcleveland.org/home.aspx

Sunscreens are important to us they help prevent skin damage from the harsh ultraviolet rays of the sun. But, the protection of our skin comes at a cost, a few of the chemicals used in sunscreens have been found to have negative effects on coral reefs.  The ingredient oxybenzone is found in 65% of non-mineral sunscreens and it has recently been discovered to damage coral DNA. Oxybenzone, while thought to be an important ingredient for sunscreen has been found to negatively impact coral reefs across the globe.

Image Source: Halle Minshall

In 2005 Dr. Craig Downes and the United States National Park Service were working in collaboration to uncover the cause of coral losses in the U.S. Virgin Islands when they stumbled upon the role sunscreen played in coral death. The tourists, sunbathers, snorkelers and divers lathered in sunscreen and to enjoy turquoise blue waters were introducing chemicals that kill the very corals and damage the ecosystem they are trying to enjoy.

Image Source: https://slideplayer.com/slide/4629733/

It is estimated that every year swimmers, snorkelers and divers introduce 14,000 tons of sunscreen to coral reefs. This introduction of the harsh chemical components in sunscreen, sea temperature rising and ocean acidification have worked together to create the perfect storm for coral reef destruction. Corals are living animals, not plants, these tiny animals build the foundations of the reef out of limestone. The tiny coral polyps live in large communities and play host to a special alga called zooxanthellae.  The zooxanthellae live inside the coral and share food they produce from photosynthesis in return for their safe housing.

Image Souce: Halle Minshall

So, what can you do to help the coral reefs?

Consider looking into some of the many “reef safe” sunscreen options and/or avoiding the need for sunscreen by wearing a hat or UV-safe long sleeved shirt and pants to protect your skin.  Alternatively, stay indoors instead of in the sun entirely.  We need to be more aware of the impact of our actions even though they may seem inconsequential.  Some states have begun to regulate the chemical components in sunscreen to help keep their coral reefs healthy.

Do your part and think about what you put on your body and into the ocean and coral reef ecosystem!

More Dangerous than Sharks

Did you know that the Florida Museum of Natural History documents all known shark attacks? They started the ISAF (International Shark Attack File) back in 1958. If we use the data collected to average fatalities from sharks over the last 60 years, the number is only 7 per year worldwide. If you put that into odds, it is 1 in 3,700,000. Now let’s compare that with the odds of dying from the flu, which is 1 in 63.

Turns out there are lot of things more dangerous than sharks, but we don’t seem to be afraid of them. So let’s take a look at what SHOULD scare us more than sharks.

How about bugs? Those annoying mosquitos are responsible for 800,000 deaths a year. Fire ants account for another 50 people and bees will kill 100 people in the U.S. alone. Those are large numbers for being such small animals.

There are plenty of other animals more dangerous to humans than sharks. Take, for example, the noble steed. Yup, horses kill about 20 people in the U.S. per year. Then there’s the loyal dog. (What can be better than a lick in the face from our beloved friend?) Turns out, dogs are responsible for 25,000 human deaths annually worldwide. And how about Bambi? Such a cute little creature, but deer are the reason 130 people die each year in the U.S. It seems cars and deer do not like each other very much.

So let’s focus on the automobile. There are more than 1.2 million traffic-related deaths every year. Traffic lights will be part of that with 2,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. People just ignore those lights but that could be because we’re all wrapped up in our online worlds. Cell phones should be far more feared than our finned-friends since 6,000 deaths in the U.S. are attributed to texting and driving.

Now that you have considered how dangerous the roads can be, perhaps you will decide to start walking more. Be forewarned—almost 6,000 people die every year from trips and falls. And if that (or any of these statistics) make you want to never leave your home, just remember that on average 450 people in the U.S. die from falling out of that bed, 26 people are crushed by sofas, and 30 folks are done in by falling televisions.

Hey, get outside already, go cut the lawn it is excessively high, but then you may be thinking about the 75 people in the U.S. that die from lawnmower accidents or the 24,000 people that die from lightning strikes every year. (Are those clouds over there?) Oh well, all this is making me hungry. Let us go wash up and go have some dinner, but watch out for the hot water. In the U.S., scalding tap water will kill 100 people this year. And oh, by the way, food—the very thing that keeps us alive—holds potential dangers. The World Health Organization estimates that about 420,000 people die yearly from contaminated food. (Five thousand of those are from contaminated raw meat within the U.S. alone.) Another 3,000 people a year die from choking and the National Institutes of Health has calculated that obesity is killing almost 300,000 people a year. And if you eat out often, take care when you sign your restaurant check because believe it or not, ballpoint pen caps are responsible for taking out 100 people per year.

So now that you are totally stressed out by these statistics, take a walk on the beach and try not to trip. However, watch out for the falling coconuts since they will add 150 people a year to that list of fatalities.

Let us celebrate being alive and safe from those sharks, but watch the champagne corks during that celebration so you do not add to the approximate 25 people per year that are killed by those projectiles!

– Matthew Ballish

Coral Reefs Need Our Help!

One of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world, coral reefs are in serious peril. Coral reefs take up about 1% of the ocean floor but are home to 25% of all ocean species including more than 4,000 species of fish.

What is a coral reef?

Coral reefs are colonies of individual animals called polyps. The polyps have tentacles to feed on plankton at night and they play host zooxanthellae—symbiotic algae that live within the coral’s tissues and gives them color. The algae need carbon dioxide and waste products from the coral for photosynthesis. In turn, through photosynthesis the algae nourish the coral with oxygen and organic compounds. The coral uses these compounds to synthesize calcium carbonate (limestone) with which it constructs its skeleton.  This skeleton contains bands, like tree rings, that record environmental changes in temperature, water chemistry and water clarity.

Why should we care about coral reefs?

Coral reefs are also known as the speed bumps of the ocean. These structures act as a natural barrier, helping to slow down and shrink waves hurtling toward the shoreline and thereby protecting coastlines and the 200 million people living along the coasts from hurricanes.

We receive many other benefits from coral reefs. Stationary animals, coral are constantly evolving chemical defenses as protection from predators.  Scientists are developing new medicines from the coral-produced compounds to help treat cancer, arthritis, bacterial infections, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, viruses and many others.

Coral reefs also provide us with food and construction materials. They also contribute heavily to the economy via tourism.

Why are coral reefs endangered?

Believe it or not coral reefs can get stressed out! There are a variety of different factors that contribute to the stress of coral reefs. For example, rising temperatures globally causes coral bleaching. Also, additional carbon dioxide oceans absorb every day contributes to increased acidification which reduces the water’s ability to carry the calcium carbonate that corals need to build skeletons.

Additionally, overfishing is changing the coral reefs ecosystem with anchors and nets destroying the natural habitat.  And when sediment and other pollutants settle on coral reefs it can speed the growth of damaging algae and lower overall water quality. With lower water quality the sunlight may not be strong enough to reach the zooxanthellae to go into photosynthesis.

How can we help?

Scientist are working to find some solutions, but all of us can join the effort to help coral reefs by reducing our carbon footprints. Try recycling or using more reusable products. Join the skip-the-straw movement reducing single-use plastic waste. Only eat fish sourced sustainably. Or, donate to organizations and support companies committed to cleaning up our oceans.

-Crystal

Baby Shark! Shark Reproduction Continued

Shark reproduction is pretty strange to begin with. But for sand tiger sharks, it is even weirder.

Sand tigers are the largest sharks you’ll see at the Greater Cleveland Aquarium. Their mating behavior is pretty ferocious.

We don’t know what prompts female sand tigers to be ready to mate. They must be mature enough in age—somewhere in their teens—and the females must also be ready to mate, which happens about every two years. We are not sure how (or if) females select mates. Scientists are still studying this!

When sand tigers mate, the much smaller males must bite and forcibly flip over the much larger and thicker-skinned females.

But before the sharks get to that point, there is a period of courtship behavior—sort of like shark dating.

Males might follow a female, swimming behind and slightly below her in the water. Then he might escalate to tailing, during which he very closely follows her. The next step is nosing. The male will follow the female very closely, with his nose, or rostrum, very close to her cloaca. (The cloaca is a shark’s reproductive canal and its way to poop. Both males and females have a cloaca.) Then the male will nudge the female, then bite her fins or body—all the while hoping to bite her and flip her over to mate.

If the male is successful, he will bite the female on the pectoral (arm-position) fin and try to flip her over. She then will become catatonic and will allow mating.

But, if the female is not interested at any point, she may bite the male right back! And remember, the females are much larger and thicker-skinned than the males. Female sand tigers can also circle close to the bottom to prevent males from approaching her to bite.

If the female is interested in mating, she may point her nose downward and allow the male a better chance to bite her.

Then the male sand tiger can hold the female’s cloaca with his clasper. Claspers are two finger-like appendages that all male sharks, skates, and rays have behind their pelvic fins. The male can then deliver his sperm, cloaca to cloaca before swimming away.

The female can store the male’s sperm for an unknown amount of time—perhaps a year, perhaps more—until it seems a good time to carry pups.

Now things get even stranger.

The female sand tiger has two uteruses. So sand tigers can carry two totally separate pregnancies.

Since sand tigers are ovoviviparous, they lay eggs internally and then give live birth. But for sand tigers, life starts under difficult circumstances. Around 20 eggs may be fertilized in each uterus. Then the eggs develop into shark embryos. The embryos grow bigger and consume all the nutrition in their individual eggs.

Then the biggest, strongest sand tiger pup in each uterus eats all of its siblings. Intrauterine cannibalism! That is what scientists call it.

The surviving sand tiger pup eats whatever new eggs keep arriving in the uterus until it is ready to be born.

After eight or nine months’ gestation, the pup is born. It will be more than three feet long and totally independent immediately.

Scientists are still learning about sand tiger shark reproduction. At the Greater Cleveland Aquarium we have seen mating behavior, but no pups yet.

– Nora Morrison