Spooky – Diving the Lady Anne
On Saturday, Monty Armstrong (A. K. A. Swami Monty) and I dived The Lady Anne an old tanker which sank from sheer neglect in Madang Harbour. Month by month we saw her going down by the stern. Eventually, she rolled over on her side and hung there at anchor for several more weeks. Finally, with a sigh of relief, she went to her rest at about 15 metres on the muddy bottom. Here is a shot of Swami Monty inspecting a propeller:
Since she lies on her side, it is a bit disorienting to swim along her length. You can see just far enough to make it very spooky.
Here a ladder lies on its side against a bulkhead. The bulkhead is now the “deck” and the ladder seems as if it has fallen over:
Here some Banner Fish swim near rusting winch machinery:
And, a hatch, once a vertical door leads down into the bowels of the ship:
Here again, a wall that was once vertical provides a playground for more Banner Fish:
Closer to the surface there were billions of fibre-like particles in the water. At first, with horror, we thought that they were probably fecal matter from the hundreds of “drop toilets” located around the inner harbour – a sanitation nightmare that the Town of Madang sees no need to fix, I suppose:
However, on close inspection, we were astonished, not to mention relieved, to see that each little fibre was a living creature.
They appear as tiny sticks with a fuzzy spiral frill wrapping around their length:
Once you realise what you are seeing, you note that all of them are madly spinning their propellers as if they were an infinite fleet of stick-like helicopters. I have no idea what they are nor why the water was filled with them that day.
Every time that I think that I’ve seen it all, I am humbled.
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Those mystery creatures are absolutely amazing, and magical. They look like something you’d see under a microscope, magnified. I bet it was some mating — or feeding — movement. I heard of such things appearing as night, as astonishingly bizarre looking creatures rise from the deep sea to feed at the surface, but never seen anything like these in all my research and photo viewing. I hope someone can weigh on in what these are….I’m sure the still shots only give a vague hint of the wondrous thing you say, as they little creatures twirled and swirled. Magical, just magical! Thanks, MadDog!
Hey Jan!!! How are you?
This looks like a amazin dive!! lets see if we will dive it once we are back!
All the best from Albert, Anna and Nora
Good to hear from you Alber. It’s an interesting dive, though not what you would call “pretty”. We just have to check the visibility condition in the inner harbour. It is right out in front of the LUSHIP Engineering Yard. I hope everything is going okay for you tripela.
There’s a lot to think about here. When you see it underwater (millions, at least), you would swear that the propeller is actually spinning. However, that can’t be. Though there are biological “motors” that do actually rotate, I think that they are mostly connected to cilia. Something as big as this (the length of the critter is about 2 cm) would create a torque that would spin the body in the opposite direction, something which we did not note. I know this because I used to fly helicopters in the Army. I think the spinning is an optical illusion. I have seen these critters many times before and just assumed, because of the astonishing number of them and their trashy appearance that it was some kind of glop from the outhouses hanging over the water. We try not to get any water into our mouths when diving in the inner harbour.
If you know anybody who might be able to identify this gizmo, please set him onto it.
Hey MadDog…no, I didn’t think they were actual “propellers” because as you said, there’s no known animal that ever figured out how to have something like a wheel, or axle, in it’s anatomy (so far as I know and have read)…..but, it certainly could be some back and forth oscillation that looks like a “propeller” when at high speed….the first thing that came to mind when I saw them was that they looked like rotifers…but, those would be damn big rotifers! That’s my best guess for now….still, way, way cool, whatever they are….
I’ve read some stuff about “biological motors” spinning cilia, but that stuff is way microscopic – maybe a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than this. No, I think it’s more like the movements of a bee wing or a hummingbird wing. It’s just so tiny when you see it in the water it looks as if it were spinning. You’re right – way too big for a rotifer, unless I’ve discovered a new species. I’m just glad it wasn’t what we first thought – CRAP!
LOL! Glad it wasn’t crap, too!
(Geez, I almost sent this with a typo in crap…using “l” for “r’!! ! !! Sometimes I’m dangerously dyslexic!)
I bet the more you could see the creature up closely, the more beautiful it becomes…..I’d love to see a closeup movie of the “spinners” or “flappers” of these things….
Also, loved the “ghost” images, btw.
I have a USB microscope that works pretty good. It can do movies. If I can get the right lighting setup and capture another critter, maybe I can get a movie of it.
[...] back to the images from my dive with Monty Armstrong on The Lady Anne I found one that I’d forgotten to massage. It’s a kind of Sea Squirt that grows [...]