Pygmy seahorses in Solomon Islands

Yes, the diver in the photo above that is me! Last weekend I was at Peava village, in the Marovo lagoon (Solomon Islands, Western Province), staying with Lisa Choquette, founder of Solomon Dive Adventures, to take a short break away from my work in Honiara (the Capital). Peava, a village of fishermen and woodcarvers, is at the end of the world, only to be reached by a small Islander plane followed by a boat ride. The weekend was not only relaxation though; I had volunteered to give workshops on Violence against Women for the villagers. But this is not the subject of this blog (maybe another one).
I probably was the only visiting diver in the whole lagoon. I had the great company under water of Lisa and Ronald, one of the four handsome villagers who were trained and certified as divemasters by Lisa. And of course there was Dellington, the boatdriver. He was also divemaster, but recovering from a malaria attack, so he did not dive.
The boat ride to our dive site Toana was rough. We had to cross to another tiny island, and there was high surf and strong winds. The dive site Toana was extraordinary (I have already almost forgotten about incidents during the first dive: the mouthpieces of both the regulator and the octopus that subsequently came off because they were not secured with tie-trips). I did two dives on this spot, one on Friday and one on Sunday (Saturday is churchday for the villagers who belong to the Seventh Day Adventist Church).
There was an enormous variety of corals, sponges, fish and other sea critters. Yes, sure there were the sharks: a white tip and a very curious gray reef shark (photo below) that came swimming to us when we were about 30 m deep, and came again, and came again, and Lisa and I played with him until we needed to move to shallower water because we ran out of the bottomtime.
But the reason for this blog is not the sharks, I’ve seen many in my life (and I hope to see numerous again when I do a sharkdive in Fiji next week). I am so excited about having seen Pygmy seahorses for the first time in my life!! They are so tiny and so well camouflaged that hardly anybody ever sees them. But... Ronald (and the rest of Lisa’s crew) knows exactly how to find incredibly difficult to spot stuff. Below you see Ronald and I searching for a seahorse on a fan coral.
There are certain pink fan corals in which the Pygmy seahorse lives. The creatures have the same colour pink and the same knobby appearance as a branch of the coral. I bet it is hard for you to see the seahorse in this picture. Look hard!
The next picture is a (different) cropped image with the seahorse in the middle (UW photos taken by Lisa). Now go back to the previous photo and enlarge it. You can estimate from my fingers and ring how tiny the seahorse is; smaller than a pinky nail. On the second dive that weekend, Lisa had for the first time in her life found a seahorse all by herself, without help of her boys, She was so proud and happy – after having been diving day after day for many years !!
After this second dive -- Lisa and I had been down for 75 minutes -- we came up and did not see the boat or the boys. Ronald had finished his dive some time before us. When the boat finally showed up, we learned that Dellington and Ronald upon seeing a swarm of fregat birds, went trailing with a fishing line and in less than 10 minutes caught in total 10 yellowfin tuna and skipjacks. Many families in the village were eating fish that evening!! I thoroughly enjoyed the fresh sashimi that Reliance (Lisa’s guest house manager) had cut for me from our freshly caught tuna. What a bonus!!
For more photos of my weekend at Peava village: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/henriette.jansen/PeavaMarovoSolomonIslands#
For more information about Lisa's project: http://www.solomondiveadventures.com/