Swain's, part II

So it turns out that only the north half of Swain's is spectacular. The other half has great visibility but the reef is severely impacted. What does that mean? Well it means something happened to the reef to change it significantly from how it should be. In this case, on the south side of Swain's there is a green colonial tunicate which is overgrowing everything. Great... so what is a "green colonial tunicate"?... Short explanation, imagine an inch of green jello coating the entire reef, killing it as it spreads. Not good.

The fish life is still pretty diverse and abundant though and I added another new species record for the territory, another anthias (like a tiny 3" grouper that lives in big schools). The highlight was this big school of blackmargin barracuda which kept mixing with a big school of rainbow runners. Both schools hung around for the better part of the dive too.

The fish below, the black durgeon, is one of the few "circumtropical fish". This means that you can find them around the world at virtually every reef system around the equator.And finally, after our fourth dive of the day we got to go onto Swain's Island. Yup, it's flat, covered in coconut trees, and has about 6 houses on it, along with a church (building on right in photo below) up on blocks (yes, the entire little building is sitting on top of a few cement blocks), and a weather station. With all this extravagance it is hard to imagine that there are only about 8 people living on this island. The central lagoon is brown, murky, and just generally unappealing. After a quick look around we swam back out to our boat, which in turn returned to the ship, and we were underway towards Tutuila.