Eunice aphroditois aka 'bobbit worm'

Eunice aphroditois :: apparently given the nickname by an underwater photographer two decades ago.

It snares its prey using a complex feeding apparatus with two sharp mandibles which snap shut like a pair of scissors

The ocean floor is home to many weird and terrifying predators, many of which could discourage anyone from ever setting foot into the sea again.

This creature is Eunice aphroditois - also known as the Bobbit worm, apparently after an underwater photographer decided two decades ago that its hunting methods were similar to the Bobbitt family incident of 1993.

That incident involved Lorena Bobbitt slicing nearly half her husband's member off. E. aphroditois is similar, according to a 2011 paper in Revista de Biologia Tropical, 'because either the widely open jaw pieces resemble scissors, or because the exposed portion resembles an erect penis.'

The nickname is inaccurate - Mrs Bobbitt inflicted the grievous injury on her husband using a knife rather than scissors - but it has stuck nevertheless.

And it is perhaps a close enough comparison to dissuade any man from skinny dipping in warm waters near the sea floor at depths of 30 to 130ft, where the long-living nocturnal worm is generally found.

The creature, which spends its life mostly buried beneath the sand of the sea-floor, sticks just a portion of its body up into the water where it has five antennae to sense its prey, usually smaller worms and fish.

Mammoth: A scientists poses with the 10ft-long E. aphroditois discovered in Japan's Seto Fishing Harbour in 2009.

It snares its prey using a complex feeding apparatus called a pharynx which can turn inside-out, like the fingers of a glove, and has sharp mandibles on the end which snap shut like scissors.

Unlucky creatures are sometimes sliced in two because of the speed and strength of the worm's attacks, and it can dish out nasty bites to any humans who stray too close.

One the prey is caught, the worm shoots back into its burrow to feed. When prey is scarce it also feeds seaweed and other sea plants, and will scavenge for morsels around the surface of its burrow.

Noted for its unusually large body size and length, E. aphroditois is found in warm waters all over the world.

Since the 19th century, marine biologists have recognised it has having one of the longest bodies among polychaetes - a class of segmented, mostly marine worms.

They average a length of about one metre, but specimens measuring as long as three metres have been discovered.

The creature, which spends its life mostly buried beneath the sand of the sea-floor, sticks just a portion of its body up into the water where it has five antennae to sense its prey, usually smaller worms and fish.

It snares its prey using a complex feeding apparatus called a pharynx which can turn inside-out, like the fingers of a glove, and has sharp mandibles on the end which snap shut like scissors.

Unlucky creatures are sometimes sliced in two because of the speed and strength of the worm's attacks, and it can dish out nasty bites to any humans who stray too close.

One the prey is caught, the worm shoots back into its burrow to feed. When prey is scarce it also feeds seaweed and other sea plants, and will scavenge for morsels around the surface of its burrow.

Noted for its unusually large body size and length, E. aphroditois is found in warm waters all over the world.

Since the 19th century, marine biologists have recognised it has having one of the longest bodies among polychaetes - a class of segmented, mostly marine worms.

They average a length of about one metre, but specimens measuring as long as three metres have been discovered.

A report by Hiro'omi Uchida, assistant director of the Kushimoto Marine Park Centre in Japan, describes one such mammoth worm found hiding in one of the floats of a mooring raft in Japan's Seto Fishing Habour in 2009.

'[I]it is uncertain when the individual first entered the mooring raft and fish corral during the 13 years the structure sat in the harbour,' he writes.

'It is also uncertain whether the worm arrived by larval settlement or at a semi-adult stage of development. Nonetheless, the individual surely had been living in its comfortable floating home for a quite a long time.'

At 9ft 10in long, about a pound in weight and with 673 segments, the worm they discovered was one of the largest specimens of E. aphroditois ever found.

That same year, a report in MailOnline Science detailed how a 4ft-long specimen was unearthed in a Newquay, Cornwall aquarium that was attacking coral and prize fish.

Workers at the attraction had been left scratching their heads as to why the coral had been left devastated and - in some cases - cut in half. After staking out the display for several weeks, the last resort was to completely dismantle it, rock by rock.

Matt Slater, the aquarium's curator, said: 'Something was guzzling our reef but we had no idea what, we also found an injured Tang Fish so we laid traps but they got ripped apart in the night.

'That worm must have obliterated the traps. The bait was full of hooks which he must have just digested.'

Staff believe the beast - which they nicknamed Barry - arrived by hitching a ride into the aquarium hiding inside a piece of coral when it was young and grew enormous over a number of years.

Mr Slater added: 'It really does look like something out of a horror movie.

Thanks to the Daily Mail

Kathy Dowsett

www.kirkscubagear.com

Life on a "liveaboard"

It’s eating, breathing and sleeping scuba diving, 24/7.

That’s life on a “liveaboard” boat that Fraser Debney experienced in the Bahamas recently. He had liked his first liveaboard trip so he decided to try it again this year.

On April 13, Fraser and some of his friends left port in Nassau Bahamas aboard a Blackbeard Cruises (http://www.blackbeard-cruises.com/) liveaboard ship for a seven-day adventure. It would confirm his first impression of the experience. He loved it. The dive boat becomes your home and restaurant for a week and you don’t return to port until the trip is done.

“It would be our shark dive,” Fraser replies when asked for his favourite experience on the trip.

It takes place at a wreck site, and a good wreck dive on its own merits. But it is also a wreck dive with a difference. Using a rope, the boat’s crew suspends a glob of waste food about 20 feet above the divers. Looking up from the wreck the divers get a close-up look at the reef sharks, which range in size from four to six feet. Fraser acknowledges that many people object to attracting sharks like this but says it is good for tourism.

“These sharks were not aggressive and I don’t believe they generally are.”
That day they saw at least 20 sharks, as well as Nassau groupers and a lot of tropical fish, “all swimming around in the same area eating the scraps as the sharks chomped on the chum. Curiously, the sharks don’t bother them (the other fish).”

James Bond Grotto in the Bahamas, where the Thunderball movie was shot, was another favourite “because of the vast expanse of things to see. That movie is underwater battles. It is almost like a small cave. There were a couple of octopus, a lot of old and interesting elk horn coral growing out of the ground and various tropical fish that made the cave their own. It has an access and exit point.”

The boat itself is about 65 feet in length and on this trip accommodated 19 divers and a crew of six. Instead of cabins there are open bunk areas. Each serves as the sleeping quarters for four to six divers. “For anyone expecting 5-star it is not 5-star. It is camping on the water with the diving as a bonus. The diving is fantastic. As long as you are comfortable being in a trailer (atmosphere) and having to be organized, the space you have is adequate. If you spread your stuff all over it is not for you.

“All the entities of a dive shop are on the boat. You don’t touch your gear. They fill up the tanks on the spot. It was interesting for me,” says Fraser. “The food was fantastic. The meals were like homemade.”

Meanwhile, the boat is travelling from one dive site to another. While bad weather limited them to a couple of dives on the first two days, generally they made four or five dives a day. When moored at the end of the day they would do night dives before moving on to the next site in the morning.

The week-long experience costs $939. It includes everything to do with your diving, food and drinks, including a beer keg in the gallery, along with wine and rum punch.
“Your first alcoholic drink is your last dive (of the day). They’re very strict. If you have a drink at 10 a.m. you don’t dive at all.”

It’s not a loud and late night, either. Tired by the busy day of diving, most people are in bed by 8 p.m.

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com

Diving Doc: Preventing and Treating Coral Scrapes

Scuba diving is traditionally a look, don't touch kind of sport. But even careful divers can inadvertently run into trouble. By far the most common diving injury is the common scrape, usually from coral.

Irritations often occur as a result of a brush with coral or sponges. Coral scrapes can be painful and sometimes difficult to heal because the living organisms in the coral can get into the wound and cause infections. Contact with a sponge can leave irritating fibers in the skin, producing an itching rash that can range from mild to severe, possibly with pain and blistering.

Even if you're careful, it's likely you'll come into contact with coral someday. If and when, here's what to do:

1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Makes sure your body is covered, even if just by a dive skin, and wear gloves where allowed.

2. Regularly irrigate a scrape with copious amounts of vinegar over a period of about 30 minutes.

3. Apply triple-antibiotic to the wound twice a day for a couple of days.

4. Scrapes can become infected even with proper initial care. Watch for hotness to the touch, redness or red streaks around the site, swelling, discharge of pus, or fever. If you see them, contact a doctor.

5. Fragments of coral sometimes become lodged beneath the skin and the body mounts a prolonged allergic reaction to them. In some cases, debridement is required to resolve the reaction.

Even in the absence of embedded coral remnants, it is not unusual for a marked hypersensitivity response to a coral injury to continue for three to four weeks before significantly improving. Sometimes the lesion will resolve, then return.

If a scrape doesn't substantially resolve within a month, or gets worse, you should consult a dermatologist.

Editor's Note: Even innocent injuries can turn deadly if you have an allergic or severe reaction. After any accident, watch for severe swelling, dizziness, blurred vision, breathing difficulties, weakness, muscle pain, cold sweat and a rapid heartbeat. If any occur, call 911 (or DAN's emergency hotline 919-684-4DAN if no emergency services are available) immediately. Injectible epinephrine can help calm allergic reactions. CPR may be necessary until help arrives.

DocVikingo has been scuba certified for more than 35 years and has dived all over the world. He is a practising doctor in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area and has held faculty positions at several major hospitals, including Johns Hopkins. With an interest in diving medicine, he serves as administrator at Scuba Clinic Online.

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com

Thirteen Things You Didn't Know About Scuba Diving Gear - But Should

Thanks to Darryl Carson and Sport Diver

Divers have an intimate connection to our equipment. But the history, evolution and hidden inner workings of many integral pieces of our collective kit might be a mystery to many of us. Check out these 13 curious details, historical head-scratchers and surprising facts, including why dive watches glow and what the heck is the “Bends-O-Matic?”

One of the earliest “dive computers”, the SOS Decompression Meter, was completely mechanical and simulated the process of gas absorption in the body. Its sketchy performance earned it the nickname “Bends-O-Matic.”

The first decompression tables, and the basis for modern dive computer algorithms, were published in 1908 by John Haldane. They were based on simulated dives using a hyperbaric chamber. The test divers were English goats.

Depth ratings for extreme deep dive watches have exceeded the known depth of the oceans. The Sinn UX is rated to 12,000 meters, more than 1000 meters deeper than the Marianas Trench.

Tritium, a radioactive material safely used in tiny quantities to make illuminated markings in many dive watches, is also used as a “booster” in multi-stage hydrogen bombs.

The rhythmic, mechanical breathing of Star Wars’ Darth Vader is iconic. It’s the amplified sound of a scuba regulator.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus in 1943. It was based on a diaphragm regulator design first developed more than a hundred years before.

Last year, Allen Sherrod, a dive instructor from Florida, spent 48 hours and 13 minutes breathing from a regulator while submerged off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida. It was a world record time for a saltwater dive.

Many warm-water divers use their octopus as a defense against stinging jellyfish. A brief purge beneath an oncoming assailant will gently lift it out of the diver’s way.

An ancient bas-relief dating back to 900 B.C. shows Assyrian divers using animal skins filled with air, which they carried with them to increase the length of their dives.

Before the standard power inflator came along, horse collar BCs incorporated small CO2 canisters to provide emergency inflation when needed, just like many personal floatation devices do today.

The popular backplate-and-wing BC design came as a cave diving innovation and improvement over “belly bags,” which uncomfortably sandwiched divers between an air bladder and a pair of heavy steel tanks.

No welding is used in making a typical aluminum scuba tank. Instead, a 32-lb. aluminum slug, 7-inches across, is pressed into shape by 2,500 lbs. of pressure in just 20 seconds.

Everyone knows LED lights are more efficient than incandescent models. But how efficient? Tests have shown burn times may average 30 times longer using identical battery power.

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com

Sea Star Time-lapse Eating Mussel

Enjoy!!!

Echinoderms: Sea Star Time-lapse: Eating Mussel from Shape of Life on Vimeo.

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com

Wearing Contact Lenses When Scuba Diving

Avid divers know what an amazing feeling it is to submerge into a world so different from our own. The underwater paradise is the only real frontier left to explore on the planet and even in frequently visited locations, like the Red Sea or Bunaken, you’ll have the opportunity to experience something unique, see fantastically colored fish and impossibly shaped coral reefs.

However, when you are scuba diving, you rely heavily on your sense of sight to take in all the beauty. This means that if live with a vision defect, such as nearsightedness or astigmatism, you will need prescription goggles or, if your wallet doesn’t stretch that far, a pair of contact lenses. So, there is no reason not to get the best experience every time you’re down in the water.

Using Contact Lenses when Diving

It is possible to wear glasses when scuba diving but it’s not the optimal choice when you’re also wearing a diving mask. What we would recommend is to wear contacts while diving. There are a couple of things to consider when you wear lenses underwater.
■If you experience mild discomfort, perhaps feel as if the lenses tighten a bit while you’re down, simply use lubricating eye drops before and after each session. This should relieve some of the irritation.
■Another thing to think about when diving with contact lenses is that you should blink as much as possible. In doing so you’ll prevent bubbles from forming underneath your lenses – these bubbles are in no way harmful to your eyes but they can cause minor discomfort and blur your vision.
■Also, when you clear your mask of water, remember to close your eyes so that you don’t lose your contact lenses!

Which Lenses to Wear

As most contact lens wearers know, there are two types of lenses; hard contacts and soft contacts. When diving, it is recommended to wear soft contacts, due to the fact that soft contacts contain a percentage of salt water which helps prevent them from floating off your eyes if they are open when you flood your mask. Hard contacts (gas-permeable) are more likely to simply disappear off your eye into the water, and it’s next to impossible to find a lost lens under water due to their inherent translucency. This is why you should always wear disposable lenses when doing water activities, since an eventual loss is not that great.

More to Think About

You shouldn’t worry about wearing contact lenses when scuba diving – it is perfectly safe. But, eye care experts suggest the following tips to keep in mind when using lenses
■When using contacts it’s important to ascend slower than normal.
■Wear soft contact lenses.
■Rinse lenses between dives to get the salt water out.
■Bring an extra pair if a problem should occur.
■Let your diving buddy know you’re wearing contacts so that he or she can retrieve your mask if you should lose it.

Other than this there is really nothing special to think about when hitting the water –simply dive right in!

Thanks to Scuba Diving

Kathy Dowsett

www.kirkscubagear.com

Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found

Thanks to:
Jo Marchant is the author of a book about the mechanism, Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer

In 1900, Greek sponge divers stumbled across "a pile of dead, naked women" on the seabed near the tiny island of Antikythera. It turned out the figures were not corpses but bronze and marble statues, part of a cargo of stolen Greek treasure that was lost when the Roman ship carrying them sank two thousand years ago on the island's treacherous rocks.

It was the first marine wreck to be studied by archaeologists, and yielded the greatest haul of ancient treasure that had ever been found. Yet the salvage project – carried out in treacherous conditions with desperately crude equipment – was never completed. So this month, armed with the latest diving technology, scientists are going back.

Antikythera Mechanism

Between 1900 and 1901, the sponge divers retrieved a string of stunning antiquities, including weapons, jewellery, furniture and some exquisite statues. But their most famous find was a battered lump that sat unnoticed for months in the courtyard of Athens' National Archaeological Museum, before it cracked open to reveal a bundle of cogwheels, dials and inscriptions.

It has taken scientists over a hundred years to decode the inner workings of those corroded fragments, with x-ray and CT scans finally revealing a sophisticated clockwork machine used to calculate the workings of the heavens.

Dubbed the Antikythera mechanism, it had pointers that displayed the positions of the sun, moon and planets in the sky, as well as a star calendar, eclipse prediction dial and a timetable of athletics events including the Olympics.

It's a stunning piece of technology that revolutionises our understanding of the abilities of the ancient Greeks. Nothing close to its complexity is known to have been created for well over a thousand years afterwards, and the emergence of mechanical clocks in medieval Europe.

There are questions that remain unanswered, such as where it's from and who built it (Posidonius, a philosopher who lived on Rhodes during the first century BC, is one candidate, while the third century BC genius Archimedes may have invented this type of device). But one of the most intriguing mysteries relates to the wreck on which it was found. What's still down there?
The wreck lies in around 60 metres of cold, rocky, current-swirled water – not an easy place to visit. The sponge divers who salvaged its cargo worked in clunky metal diving suits with little understanding of the dangers of diving at such depth. By the time they abandoned their project, two of them had been paralysed by the bends, and one was dead. They left behind stories of abandoned treasures, including giant marble statues that rolled down the steep slope from the wreck and out of reach.

The undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau spent a couple of days at the wreck site in 1978 and brought up some precious smaller items, including some coins from the Asia Minor coast, which suggested that the ship sailed from there around 70-60 BC (probably carrying war booty from Greek colonies back to Rome). But even with their sleek scuba gear, Cousteau's divers could spend only brief minutes on the seabed without risking the bends.

No one has been back since. Now, after years of negotiations with the Greek authorities, Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist based at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, finally has permission to dive at Antikythera. He's working with Greek archaeologists including Theotokis Theodoulou of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.

This week, the team begins a three-week survey using rebreather technology, which recycles unused oxygen from each breath and allows divers to stay deeper for longer. The aim is to survey the wreck site properly for the first time, to find out once and for all what has been left down there – and to check down the slope, to 70 metres depth or more, to see if those stories of runaway statues are true.
Any items found on the wreck site could provide further clues to the origin or ownership of the ship. And not all of the pieces of the Antikythera mechanism were ever found. It's a long shot, but those missing bits could still be on the seabed.

This isn't what gets Foley most excited about the project, however. His team will also dive around the entire island, a distance of about 17 nautical miles, using James Bond-style propellers to cover ground quickly. Foley hopes this could reveal a whole clutch of previously unknown wrecks.
The island of Antikythera sits in the middle of what has been a busy trade route since ancient times: a treacherous shard of rock notorious for downing ships in a storm. In Roman times, it was also an infamous centre for pirates. So it's a good bet that there are plenty of other wrecks here, from all periods of history.

On a two-day reconnaissance survey in June this year, Foley and his team discovered the wreck of a British warship called HMS Nautilus, lost in 1807, plus a range of ancient anchors, ceramics and a 19th-century naval gun.

This suggests the area hasn't been looted (which makes sense given the difficulty of diving here), so any new wrecks found could be pristine. "Everyone is very, very excited," Foley says of the upcoming mission. "This ought to be extraordinary."

He also points out that the Antikythera ship, with its valuable cargo, is unlikely to have been travelling alone. When it sank, others in its fleet may have gone down too. Could one of them have been carrying another Antikythera mechanism? For the past hundred years, this awe-inspiring device has stood alone, our only glimpse into a technology lost for millennia. That might – just might – now change.

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com