Snorkeling & Collecting Discussion Group

[Ron Reefman]

As you know I'm from Michigan but I have been out to Sanibel Island 3 times over the past 6 years. Love the place! The only thing I did not care for was the no-see-ums bugs lol. I had bites all over me and they itched ALL the way home. The thing is you can't see them or feel them bite but that night you sure do lol.

No-see-ums have a time schedule, they like dawn and dusk. They have a location, they like being around foliage. They have weather issues, they like humid, damp and calm winds and hate sun and wind. All that said, different people react to them differently as well. Some people are really effected in a serious way, like you, and no-see-ums can be as bad as mosquitoes. But for other people, they are hardly even noticed.

The last time we were out it was early and there was no wind. I did notice the no-see-ums as they would bite, but I never feel any after effects. And we didn't have any bug spray with us as these pests haven't been a big problem for us in the past. But even a mosquito bite only raises an itchy bump for about 30 minutes on my while they raise nasty welts for 1 to 2 days on a friend of mine. But any time we are out doing a beach walk and looking for livestock, it's almost always cooler to cold temperatures (at least for no-see-ums) and usually windy.

As a side note, this summer when the Red Tide was really at its height we did a beach walk. Because they cleaned the beach almost every day of dead fish, that wasn't a issue we had trouble with. But it became obvious to us that the native wildlife did. First we noticed there were absolutely no shore birds. No flocks of gulls running around on the beach by the dozens (normal) or even a single bird. Then we relived there were no pelicans. We would normally see at least a few and often as many as 20 or 30 in a 2 hour beach walk. But the scary realization came we we noticed there were almost no flies feasting on the dead fish that were on the beach. Even after clean up, there were dead fish every 10 to 20 feet and almost no flies!

But things seem to be getting back to a somewhat more normal situation now. We saw no dead fish and they aren't doing beach clean ups any more. And we did see a few flocks of different types of birds picking at the algae and poking at the sand along the water's edge. Now If I could just find some sponges... my tank needs a few porcelain crabs and a few pistol shrimp! LOL!

 

[shred5]

Just wanted to let you know how much I like this thread.
I do not have much to share. I have done allot of scuba dives and snorkeling in the keys as well as other places.
My favorite is drift diving off of West Palm and Fort Lauderdale area.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Just wanted to let you know how much I like this thread.
I do not have much to share. I have done allot of scuba dives and snorkeling in the keys as well as other places.
My favorite is drift diving off of West Palm and Fort Lauderdale area.

Thanks alot, I appreciate your letting me know. I know more people scuba than snorkel and many people are against collecting from the ocean. But I love snorkeling in nice warm water that is so shallow I can easily pick stuff up off the bottom. There are times we are in water that is barely 2 feet deep and the bottom is all coral and sponges. You have to dig down 2 to 8 inches to find sand! Like in the photo below, from where I'm standing to the island (maybe 50 yards or more) is never more than about 2 feet deep and the bottom is just alive with corals, sponges and all kinds of animals. And since I've found the fun of rescuing live animals off the beach and teaching shell collectors about what else there is besides shells, beach walks have become a lot more fun. I just want to share my enthusiasm! And offer help to anybody who might be in the area or want to try snorkeling or beach collecting.

 

[shred5]

Thanks alot, I appreciate your letting me know. I know more people scuba than snorkel and many people are against collecting from the ocean. But I love snorkeling in nice warm water that is so shallow I can easily pick stuff up off the bottom. There are times we are in water that is barely 2 feet deep and the bottom is all coral and sponges. You have to dig down 2 to 8 inches to find sand! Like in the photo below, from where I'm standing to the island (maybe 50 yards or more) is never more than about 2 feet deep and the bottom is just alive with corals, sponges and all kinds of animals. And since I've found the fun of rescuing live animals off the beach and teaching shell collectors about what else there is besides shells, beach walks have become a lot more fun. I just want to share my enthusiasm! And offer help to anybody who might be in the area or want to try snorkeling or beach collecting.

Yea it amazes me how shallow parts of the keys are. I mean sometimes you barely can see land and the water is still pretty shallow.

I remember when I realized something was wrong in the keys with the acropora.
I can not remember if I was diving or snorkeling but the operator took us out to this stand of Acropora cervicornis that was as far as the eye could see and it was all dead. This was maybe 20 years ago or so and probably snorkeling since this acro is usually in pretty shallow water.

Anyway I got out of the water and said why did you take me here for and the operator went SHHHH.. He took me aside and said he takes people here because there is less damage people can do here since the coral is dead already and most people only care about fish anyway. He then took me to molasses reef which at the time was fantastic. I hear it did not do so well later and they tried to transplant some acro there. I thought I heard it didn't take.
Over the years the reefs in the area seem to be getting taken over by gorgonia. You seeing the same? I have not been out there in years but I have heard things are improving.


You seeing any of lion fish?
I was talking to Henry Schultz who now runs a dive operation in Cozumel. You may remember him because he used to write articles on saltwater fish and give talks on fish.
He is has been seeing some as far south as Cozumel.

I need to get down there and do some snorkeling. Maybe even meet up sometime and you could show me some cool spots.

I think the last time I snorkeled was in the Bahamas about 3 years ago.
I was just in Cozumel and didn't even get in the water. I didn't even get a chance to meet up with Henry because he is so busy with dives.

 

[Reef-junky]

Good Luck Ron!

 

[Ron Reefman]

I don't like blowing my own horn, but I want people to find this article. I admit I rarely look at them as most are aimed at helping people learn about the hobby and after 15 years, there aren't many articles that catch my interest. But seawitch asked for volunteers who were willing to be profiled by her and I liked the first one she did so I volunteered. I do like reading stories by and about the people here at R2R. After the profile was posted I offered to write an article if it would be of any interest. I was given the green light and I did one about collecting while simply walking the beach. You can find it here:

https://www.reef2reef.com/ams/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-beachcomber.554/

Comments about it (good or bad), or questions related to any part of it are welcome. You can post in the discussion after the article or here in this thread and I'll do my best to reply.

 

[KrisReef]

I'm back from the Keys. Thursday was AWESOME! It was a bit too windy to do anything on the oceanside of the Keys, but the Florida Bay side was better. And we snorkeled the lee side of Little Money Key (near the SW end of the Seven Mile Bridge). To start things here is a photo of me just getting away from the Zodiac in 30" of water. The sandy path out in front of me (50 yards away) is so shallow you can't snorkel over it at low tide. In this area there's a lot of water that is so shallow you don't have to dip your snorkel under the surface to reach things on the bottom! That will be true of almost every photo I'll post of the next week or more. BTW, my wife took all the underwater photos!

P8020230 by Ron Lindensmith, on Flickr


And this is a pair of shots that is very unusual and drove me crazy. The coral is an sps and therefore totally and completely illegal to collect with just a saltwater fishing license. And in this area of several acres of shallow water, this was the only colony of this coral we saw. And it would be hard to miss! And to make matters worse, it has two nice red feather dusters in it! The good news is, I'm 90% sure this is not a photosynthetic coral, so it would be very difficult to keep in most aquariums.

First is a longer shot so you can see how it just jumps out at you from the rest of the surroundings. Oh, and BTW, this was about 20 feet from where we anchored the Zodiac!

P8020177 by Ron Lindensmith, on Flickr


And then the close up. Man, it just killed me to leave this coral. Odds are that somebody who doesn't know crap about coral will see this and think they can take it home, dry it out and put it on a shelf and it will still be yellow after it's dead! I know exactly where it is and the next time I go there I'll look for it. But the after effects of Hurricane Irma have got some funky algae growing all over the place at this site. So this was the bright spot in our 3+ hours of snorkeling as well as the part that frustrated me the most.

P8020176 by Ron Lindensmith, on Flickr


More , many more photos to follow!

Ron, I've seen these in the Carribean and thought that they were Porites lobata?
How long did this coral remain where you first observed it? I think these roll around with storms, some get massive like the size of a Mini Cooper, or even a station wagon and in huge stroms those larger rocks will sometimes get over turned and tossed up on the beach where they become dead live rock and ground up by the waves into sizes that allow them to be transported by tourists to all points on the planet. These used to come into the fish trade as xmas tree rock.

Loving this thread.

 

[shred5]

Ron, I've seen these in the Carribean and thought that they were Porites lobata?
How long did this coral remain where you first observed it? I think these roll around with storms, some get massive like the size of a Mini Cooper, or even a station wagon and in huge stroms those larger rocks will sometimes get over turned and tossed up on the beach where they become dead live rock and ground up by the waves into sizes that allow them to be transported by tourists to all points on the planet. These used to come into the fish trade as xmas tree rock.

Loving this thread.

Looks like Porites astreoides.

 

[KrisReef]

I don't like blowing my own horn, but I want people to find this article. I admit I rarely look at them as most are aimed at helping people learn about the hobby and after 15 years, there aren't many articles that catch my interest. But seawitch asked for volunteers who were willing to be profiled by her and I liked the first one she did so I volunteered. I do like reading stories by and about the people here at R2R. After the profile was posted I offered to write an article if it would be of any interest. I was given the green light and I did one about collecting while simply walking the beach. You can find it here:

https://www.reef2reef.com/ams/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-beachcomber.554/

Comments about it (good or bad), or questions related to any part of it are welcome. You can post in the discussion after the article or here in this thread and I'll do my best to reply.

Yup, I saw what @Seawitch did to you publishing a feature article. I was glad she did that because that reminded me that I needed to catch up on where this thread was going/has gone. It's a fine thread, and lots of dialogue has been assembled for the betterment of humanity IMHO.
@shred5 Yup, Porites rockii, (Lol) I'm pretty lame at these names and species, but I do love to snorkel and observe what is going on with reefs.

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in on this thread, and RR for launching it. It takes a certain kind of person to host shell talks for tourists and to post up conversations on-line that get people discussing cool stuff like reefs, collection, conservation, collection, living reef creatures, collection, etc. I like collecting myself.

 

[Seawitch]

I loved this beachcomber piece, and it's very different from what we usually see.

 

[Ron Reefman]

OK, so Thursday and Friday a pretty strong cold front passed through SW Florida with 20+ mph westerly winds for over 36 hours and 30+ mph winds for 6-8 of those 36 hours. That should make for lots of stuff on the beach. BTW, we talk about a good beach day as one that is warm to hot with only breezy winds. The water will be very clear and shelling or beach finds of live animals will be very poor. A good shelling day is more often cool to cold and you are probably out on the beach at dawn before the shells get picked over. A good collecting day is usually even colder (in the 50's is cold for SW Florida) and it was windy the day before. You get to the beach early and hope you find sponges or clumps of algae on the beach or where the beach meets the water and most of the livestock you will collect will be inside those sponges or in the algae.

We got to the beach at 7am just as the sun was starting to peek over the horizon. It was a full moon the night before and it was just setting as the sun was rising. That makes for one of the two really low tide times. The other is with a new moon and the moon and the sun rise and set about the same time, and because the moon is up while the sun is up (and they are close together in the sky) you don't see the moon. As we walked out onto the beach from the path that gets us from the parking lot, we see the area has some stuff down near the water, but not a lot and no sponges. So we decide to walk off to the left which is SE since the last couple of times we have done beach walks we've gone right and had very little luck.



Well we didn't walk to far and the number of shells just up from the edge of the water were increasing. And there were quite a few lightning whelk shells among the usual pen shells, arcs and scallops. But still no sponges or algae. The further we walked, the number of shells just kept increasing. Then the beach split and we were on a sandbar where between us and the rest of the beach there was a narrow strip of water. The further we walked, the bigger the separation was between us and the beach. At this point we stated to see some live mollusks as well as more and more shells. There were live lightning whelks, live horse conchs, live quahogs and quite a few good size live sand dollars. That was fun too see. There were also quite a few (compared to a normal beach day) huge lightning whelk and horse conch shells that there very beat up and covered with lots of barnacles. But there were so many nice smaller lightning whelk shells we started getting picky! Oh, this one has a broken edge and that one has some barnacles on it. These were just like many of the first ones we had picked up, but now we were leaving them behind.







One other fun thing we got to do is check out all the crab traps that had washed up over night. I'd say in our 3 hour on the beach we saw at least 12 to 15. And in several of them we found live stone crabs and blue crabs. Since they were on the beach and didn't have marker buoys attached, we decided to pull the crabs and put them back in the water. When I moved to Florida and first started finding these bigger crabs, I would keep my distance. Those claws can do some real damage. But I've finally overcome my fear and I've learned how to hold them and stay clear of the claws.





So it turned out to be a pretty darn good shelling day, but a useless collecting day for critters. And that's not all bad. A good shelling day is fun, and if you get to see some big live specimens while shelling, that's all the better. In fact in all the beach walks we've done over the years, we've never seen live quahogs before. And this time there were quite a few and some of them were huge (bigger than a softball). And some of them had a nice blue shading toward the back of the shell by the hinge. At one point we found 2 big horse conchs alive and almost next to each other. We took some photos and then I walked then out 20 feet or so into the water.





By this point the tide was coming in and we were on a sandbar that was going to get cut off from the beach and if we didn't wade back to the beach soon we end up having to swim. And it's hard to swim in cold water while wearing a wetsuit bottom, jeans, a long underwear shirt, a nylon windbreaker, a Bailey Matthews National Shell Museum shell ambassador shirt and a very heavy fleece shirt/jacket. Yes, 58 degrees along the shore with breezy conditions and our Florida blood gets cold so we dress warm.

All the shells we collected are in buckets of clean water and bleach. As soon as they are ready to be dried, I'll take some photos and post them here as well.

 

[Reef-junky]

OK, so Thursday and Friday a pretty strong cold front passed through SW Florida with 20+ mph westerly winds for over 36 hours and 30+ mph winds for 6-8 of those 36 hours. That should make for lots of stuff on the beach. BTW, we talk about a good beach day as one that is warm to hot with only breezy winds. The water will be very clear and shelling or beach finds of live animals will be very poor. A good shelling day is more often cool to cold and you are probably out on the beach at dawn before the shells get picked over. A good collecting day is usually even colder (in the 50's is cold for SW Florida) and it was windy the day before. You get to the beach early and hope you find sponges or clumps of algae on the beach or where the beach meets the water and most of the livestock you will collect will be inside those sponges or in the algae.

We got to the beach at 7am just as the sun was starting to peek over the horizon. It was a full moon the night before and it was just setting as the sun was rising. That makes for one of the two really low tide times. The other is with a new moon and the moon and the sun rise and set about the same time, and because the moon is up while the sun is up (and they are close together in the sky) you don't see the moon. As we walked out onto the beach from the path that gets us from the parking lot, we see the area has some stuff down near the water, but not a lot and no sponges. So we decide to walk off to the left which is SE since the last couple of times we have done beach walks we've gone right and had very little luck.



Well we didn't walk to far and the number of shells just up from the edge of the water were increasing. And there were quite a few lightning whelk shells among the usual pen shells, arcs and scallops. But still no sponges or algae. The further we walked, the number of shells just kept increasing. Then the beach split and we were on a sandbar where between us and the rest of the beach there was a narrow strip of water. The further we walked, the bigger the separation was between us and the beach. At this point we stated to see some live mollusks as well as more and more shells. There were live lightning whelks, live horse conchs, live quahogs and quite a few good size live sand dollars. That was fun too see. There were also quite a few (compared to a normal beach day) huge lightning whelk and horse conch shells that there very beat up and covered with lots of barnacles. But there were so many nice smaller lightning whelk shells we started getting picky! Oh, this one has a broken edge and that one has some barnacles on it. These were just like many of the first ones we had picked up, but now we were leaving them behind.







One other fun thing we got to do is check out all the crab traps that had washed up over night. I'd say in our 3 hour on the beach we saw at least 12 to 15. And in several of them we found live stone crabs and blue crabs. Since they were on the beach and didn't have marker buoys attached, we decided to pull the crabs and put them back in the water. When I moved to Florida and first started finding these bigger crabs, I would keep my distance. Those claws can do some real damage. But I've finally overcome my fear and I've learned how to hold them and stay clear of the claws.





So it turned out to be a pretty darn good shelling day, but a useless collecting day for critters. And that's not all bad. A good shelling day is fun, and if you get to see some big live specimens while shelling, that's all the better. In fact in all the beach walks we've done over the years, we've never seen live quahogs before. And this time there were quite a few and some of them were huge (bigger than a softball). And some of them had a nice blue shading toward the back of the shell by the hinge. At one point we found 2 big horse conchs alive and almost next to each other. We took some photos and then I walked then out 20 feet or so into the water.





By this point the tide was coming in and we were on a sandbar that was going to get cut off from the beach and if we didn't wade back to the beach soon we end up having to swim. And it's hard to swim in cold water while wearing a wetsuit bottom, jeans, a long underwear shirt, a nylon windbreaker, a Bailey Matthews National Shell Museum shell ambassador shirt and a very heavy fleece shirt/jacket. Yes, 58 degrees along the shore with breezy conditions and our Florida blood gets cold so we dress warm.

All the shells we collected are in buckets of clean water and bleach. As soon as they are ready to be dried, I'll take some photos and post them here as well.

Very cool Ron

 

[dbraun15]

Really nice photos...we were in Orange Beach over Thanksgiving and my oldest daughter(14) wanted to wake up and go for a walk and find shells early morning. I figured it was all talk, but I realized it wasn’t as she shook me awake at 5:30. Weather was in the middle 40’s and we were hoping for a great shelling day. Unfortunately there was nothing to speak of except a nice sunrise and extra time with my daughter! Maybe next time...really enjoying your adventures and wish we lived closer to be able to do it more often...what’s wrong with a nice sunrise??

 

[Ron Reefman]

So, over the last few days my wife and I have had some time to clean and sort the shells we collected from the beach last Saturday (Dec 22nd). The haul of lightning whelks was amazing. I guess what was amazing was that we collected so many and yet there were lots of other people on the beach and they were collecting lightning whelks just as fast as we were. And after Elaine had her bucket half full we became 'picky' and didn't pick any that had damage or that had barnacles or jingles (a mollusk that has a small, flat, round shell) attached to it. As it was, about 25% of the lightning whelks we collected at first had barnacles and jingles and Elaine spent about 30 minutes scraping them off, dipping them in a vinegar and water solution and then scrubbing them to remove the last residue. Elaine has wiped these down with baby oil so they have their typical wet look.



I've always found the common scallop shells to be favorite. Of course there are almost always some nice scallop shells on the Sanibel beaches, but Saturday was a bit special with some extra nice ones. So I did collect my fair share. I'm starting to look for something to make with the scallops. We are taking care of a neighbor's 5 cats for the week (Christmas to New Years) and I saw a really nice cone shape display of kitten's paws (a much smaller shell than a scallop, but similar in shape). Being Christmas time it reminded me of a Christmas tree. His ex-wife had made it by glueing the hinged edge of the shells into a foam cone with the shell sticking out flat, parallel to the ground. I'm thinking I might try something like that but use bigger scallops at the bottom and smaller ones at the top and set them in at something like a 45 degree angle sloping down so the pretty face of the shells are exposed. And these shells are still in their dry, untreated state. I have to decide if I want to use baby oil to make them look good but then hard to glue, or spray them with clear polyurethane to get the wet look.



We also got some other nice shells. Tulips are not uncommon to find on the beach, but this was a better than average day and we found quite a few. Fighting conchs are quite common on some days and less so on other days. We collected some shells and returned a dozen or more live ones to the water. We did the same for many sand dollars that were up on the beach but still alive. I did find one big one that was dead and I brought it home (it's not in the photo). The long narrow white shells are angel's wings and they are a more delicate shell and are easily broken,. So finding a couple in really good shape was a nice bonus.

I mentioned in the first post about this walk (#211) that we liberated a few stone crabs and blue crabs from traps that were washed up on the beach. One trap had a single crab, also had a medium sized horse conch shell that was still very orange and with very little damage. I wondered if the conch had wandered into the trap like the crabs do and couldn't find it's way out and starved to death or if the stone crab ate it? In any event, we got a nice horse conch shell with great color..



The down side to the day was that there were no sponges or clumps of macro algae for me to inspect for porcelain crabs or pistol shrimp, so shell collecting and doing my volunteer job of being a Bailey Matthews National Shell Museum shell ambassador were my other options. I did have a dozen or more people ask me questions about shells. When they do, I always ask if they wouldn't mind telling me where they are from. Saturday I heard Maine, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kansas, California and a few others and only one from Florida! And she was a snowbird who lives on Sanibel in the winter and in North Carolina in the summer. I always enjoy sharing info with visitors to Florida. Or for that matter with anybody who is interested. Even 98% of the locals we meet on the beach have no idea how many live animals are hidden there. Oh sure, they see the live conchs and whelks, or the live sand dollars, occasionally maybe even a live sea star (they don't last long out of the water). But they never realized that some of the other small mollusks on the beach along with critters in the sponges and algae are still very much alive. It's great fun showing them what is right at their feet and they had no idea was there.

 

[tripdad]

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

 

[Navymedic]

Thanks for sharing, I live in Orlando and most times we head out beachcombing we usually get a few hermits etc. Once we even caught a lionfish and knowing it was invasive collected it. We had it in Q tank for about 3 months and then decided to give it to a fellow hobbyist.

I collected one RFA in Key West, I will post a pic in the near future, Purple center with green tentacles. I hope to maybe visit SW Florida in the future. Thanks again.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Thanks for sharing, I live in Orlando and most times we head out beachcombing we usually get a few hermits etc. Once we even caught a lionfish and knowing it was invasive collected it. We had it in Q tank for about 3 months and then decided to give it to a fellow hobbyist.

I collected one RFA in Key West, I will post a pic in the near future, Purple center with green tentacles. I hope to maybe visit SW Florida in the future. Thanks again.

Take a look at this line of conversation:
https://www.reef2reef.com/conversations/swfmas-snorkel-trip.1176742/

I'm thinking of doing a snorkel/collecting trip in May and I'd like to open it up to anybody who would like to come. I haven't talked about it with our local club yet, so it's all entirely up in the air at this point.

 

[Navymedic]

Take a look at this line of conversation:
https://www.reef2reef.com/conversations/swfmas-snorkel-trip.1176742/

I'm thinking of doing a snorkel/collecting trip in May and I'd like to open it up to anybody who would like to come. I haven't talked about it with our local club yet, so it's all entirely up in the air at this point.

Depends when in May but I am in, might even rent a room for a couple of days so the wife and I can take a staycation

 

[Ron Reefman]

Yesterday wasn't a particularly good shelling or collecting day at the beach, but a fellow R2R member happened to be down in SW Florida on vacation and we arranged a chance for them to stop by at our house to see our tank and then we went to a State Park called Lover's Key. It's just south of Ft Myers Beach. There wasn't anything to special there, but we had fun getting out on what turned out to be a nice sunny day (it was heavy overcast as the sun was coming up and we were headed to the beach). We did get to see some upside down jellyfish swimming around from a foot bridge over a back estuary. And we found a couple of live crown conchs when we walked around a bit in a different estuary.

All in all it was fun and we even agreed to do a little trade as I have captive breed rock flower anemones and they have captive bred clownfish!

After I get back from doing the first autocross event of the season, I'll post a few of the photos my wife took during the day.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Yesterday wasn't a particularly good shelling or collecting day at the beach, but a fellow R2R member happened to be down in SW Florida on vacation and we arranged a chance for them to stop by at our house to see our tank and then we went to a State Park called Lover's Key. It's just south of Ft Myers Beach. There wasn't anything to special there, but we had fun getting out on what turned out to be a nice sunny day (it was heavy overcast as the sun was coming up and we were headed to the beach). We did get to see some upside down jellyfish swimming around from a foot bridge over a back estuary. And we found a couple of live crown conchs when we walked around a bit in a different estuary.

All in all it was fun and we even agreed to do a little trade as I have captive breed rock flower anemones and they have captive bred clownfish!

After I get back from doing the first autocross event of the season, I'll post a few of the photos my wife took during the day.