Miyagi Seawall, Okinawa & Ishigaki diving pics

[tribbitt]

Inspired to share images taken in June of 2024 at various dive sites in Japan


Miyagi Seawall (Post 1/multiple):


Tremendous hammer colony

Okinawa was a sea of soft coral + occasional LPS

Goniopora sp.

Fungiid solitary corals + Pectinia (paeonia?) + Porites sp.

What we call "Japanese deepwater leathers" found no more than 15ish meters down

Another Sarcophyton, with fantastic white polyps

Hammer with green on the sides of tentacles, visible in daylight

Plerogyra sp. bubble coral on a tetrapod near shore

A mini-bommie with what looks like a Pagoda cup (Duncanopsammia peltata) and a huge colony of flabello-meandroid wall hammer

Those white specks are NOT detritus! They're white specks on the sides of symbiotic anemone shrimp on the same hammer colony pictured above.

 

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Bright red Lobophyllia next to some Faviid corals on a tetrapod

Christmas tree worms in Porites sp., also on a tetrapod

Tomato clownfish in host anemone (they bit my mask)

Some species of Pocillopora?

Humongous sea cucumbers, like 20 of them, the smallest a foot long, the largest maybe 2 feet.

Tridacnid clam much deeper than I expected. The light in the picture is mostly flashlight, it was really surprisingly dim here

 

[tribbitt]

Ishigaki (This was a boat dive quite far from the island actually). Phenomenal water clarity there.

You can see the cumulative damage following successive bleaching events in the area. Tons of dead coral partially covered by coralline algae. The corals that are alive generally seemed healthy, though.

I didn't photograph the tremendous colonies of Porites or Astreopora or whatever it was, huge boulders dozens of meters across, at the bottom. But those were doing fine

Here are photos I did take:

Gorgeous blue Acropora sp. staghorn corals

Fantastic clams

Magnificent anemone (H. magnifica) with damselfish and a few clownfish (can't tell if they're A. ocellaris or percula, but they were quite small)

Polyp extension was really nice

Clarkii anemonefish in Crispa anemone? Not sure, but these ones didn't bite me

Some truly huge tabling Acropora spp.

Tomato clownfish in a familiar anemone: E. quadricolor, the Bubble Tip

Some soft corals

Some gorgeous green staghorn Acropora sp.

 

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Ishigaki, contd.

More giant clam

More green Acropora

Tables upon tables

Close-up

Hey, a unique one: a green Sandolitha sp.

Wild corals get RTN too, it's not just you

Again look at the scale of these colonies

One more magnifica, with two clownfish (can you spot them both?)

 

[Kensington Reefer]

More more more!!
Thanks for sharing

 

[tribbitt]

Updated all the posts!

 

[L/B Block]

Very cool.

 

[Kensington Reefer]

@tribbitt more more more!!!

What was the red stuff...sponge?

 

[tribbitt]

@tribbitt more more more!!!

What was the red stuff...sponge?

I'll go look if there's more pictures.

The red stuff... Some of it looked kind of spongy, but others were definitely crustose, calcifying red algae. I don't think it's the type of coralline that grows in most of our tanks though. Some of it was orange and looked almost leptoseris-like with the surface texture, especially from Ishigaki, which I imagine could be cool in captivity. Who knows

 

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And from ishigaki

Dive buddy's hand for scale

Oh yeah I saw 2 sea snakes! Here's one of them.

@Kensington Reefer You can see in this picture some of that cool red-orange algae. I wonder what it is too

 

[Kensington Reefer]

@tribbitt
What was the water temperature?
Were you in full wetsuit?

 

[JVU]

Amazing pics, thanks for sharing them

 

[tribbitt]

@tribbitt
What was the water temperature?
Were you in full wetsuit?

Full wetsuit at Sunabe Seawall in Miyagi, shorty wetsuit in Ishigaki. Don't have exact temperature but it was always decently comfortable. Got a little chilly at 20m

 

[gmdcdvm]

Awesome pics! Thank you for sharing. I always thought plate corals liked the sand. The pics of them on the rocks was cool.
G

 

[tribbitt]

Awesome pics! Thank you for sharing. I always thought plate corals liked the sand. The pics of them on the rocks was cool.
G

I didn't see a single plate coral on the sand, all of them are nestled in a rock across all the locations.

Sand tends to get kicked up on top of corals which causes necrosis. In the wild, with some exceptions, there are few true sandbed corals. Homophyllia (scoly), cynarina and acanthophyllia all grow out of rocks (a lot of them are vertical, like sideways like the bright red lobo I posted above). Micromussa, chalices, lobos, flower anemones grow out of rock. In most sandy places there's just not a lot of coral.

At the Steinhart tour, I think I remember hearing that whenever they added plate corals, they scooched themselves off the sand toward the rubbly areas.

There are definitely exceptions, and some environments with lots of sandy coral though. Jake Adams had a video which I'm trying to find where he went through this seagrass bed and points out a bunch of cool stuff on the sand

 

[Mr. Seahorse]

I went to Japan and Okinawa last summer. My favorite travel destination, bummer it's such a long flight though.

 

[PizzaOven]

Amazing photos! What camera did you shoot with?

 

[tribbitt]

Amazing photos! What camera did you shoot with?

Gopro in miyagi seawall, a rental camera in enclosure for Ishigaki. Was too scared to use phone in a ziploc bag