Triton’s trumpets are snails and their shells are the second largest in the Indo-Pacific. They can attain a length of 20 inches. The colorful shells are also quite beautiful, especially when they catch the light filtering down from above.
These snails eat echinoderms including Crown-of-Thorns stars, which feed on corals.
A small cleaner wrasse works at removing parasites, dead tissue and mucus from a great barracuda. The service they provide is recognized by larger potential predators, which don’t harm these little blue and yellow fish, even when they go inside the mouth to clean.
Great barracudas are generally mostly silver with black marks on the tail fins and second dorsal fins. However, some great barracudas, such as this one, have black marks on other fins and their silvery sides are mottled with darker markings.
The yellow chub in this photo is actually a gray chub, but a few individuals, such as this one, can be yellow, white, or multicolored. This one is something of a regular at one spot on the North Kohala coast.
The orangespine unicornfish is seen in many places along the coast and always has a grumpy look. In this case, it looks like it’s upset that the chub has swum into its territory.
Humpback whales have returned to Hawaiian waters. They spend the summers in Alaska and then come down here to have their calves and to breed. This year, the first whales were spotted early – at the end of October. I saw a couple in early November, but then nothing for a month.
This, of course, doesn’t mean they weren’t around, just that I didn’t see any. But in the second half of December I started seeing more of them and more activity, and now I see one or two most days.
On this day, I saw five whales. Three were just blowing, but two cruised along the coast, in the same direction I was walking, and were quite active. In the top photo, one of the whales rises out of the water – not a full breach, but what might be called a head slap as it bangs back down. In the other photo, the whale dives. When an adult whale dives it can stay underwater for 20 minutes or more.
This is the molted shell of an a’ama crab, seen on the North Kohala shore. A’ama crabs are numerous around the Big Island and they scuttle away when disturbed. But while these crabs are black, their molted shells turn red in the sun, as this one has.
It had been a good while since I’d seen a turtle in the water until I spotted this one. It was cruising along at a leisurely speed, over the rocks and coral. I followed it for a while and then left it to meander on its way.
On a recent snorkeling expedition I was lucky to notice this eagle ray sliding by below in some hazy water. It’s the smallest eagle ray I’ve seen, with a wingspan of about a foot-and-a-half. Adults can have a wingspan of up to ten feet though the ones I see are mostly in the five to six feet range.
One nice thing to see was that this little ray was in perfect condition with nary a mark on it. Some of the bigger ones look like they have been in the wars.
These quite large fish are commonly seen hanging in the water in small groups. When approached they will ease away without any apparent effort so that it’s difficult to get close enough for a good photo.
This one, however, displayed the same kind of curiosity chubs tend to have. It went by two or three times, clearly checking out the large, ungainly creature splashing around in the water, before deciding I wasn’t very interesting and moving away into deeper water.
Graham's Island 