Sydney Aquarium
All fish are actually named Bob, you know...
February 1999

One of the first places I went to in Sydney was Sydney Aquarium. I took rather a lot of pictures, far more than the various ocean dwelling whatnots deserved, but here for your bemusement are some of the creatures on show there.

Here we have... fish.

Hmmm...

I can see a problem with annotating these photos some time after they were taken. Despite my being a qualified open water and advanced SSI diver, my knowledge of what I'm actually looking at under the waves is still fairly hopeless. Which is why this page is going to be a bit threadbare on the details of what I'm showing. So excuse me if I waffle even more than usual.

Okay, the next photo is of a crocodile, I know that. Unless it's an alligator. No, wait a minute, alligators only inhabit North America if I remember correctly, so it must be a crocodile.

Much later in my Australian adventures I'd wind up seeing quite a number of crocodiles in Queensland and the Northern Territories, but I still can't tell them apart from alligators very well. There's distinctions to do with snout shape and back scales and so forth but that doesn't help because I can never remember which type applies to which species.

On the whole, in captivity there's always going to be a sign or a guide to tell you what you're looking at, and in the wild... well, you'd be too busy screaming and running for your life. People who pause and think "Now, is this an estuarine crocodile or an escaped alligator that's waddling towards me" are not going to last long I think.

More fish. The photo (left) reminded me of the start of Monty Python's Meaning of Life, with the fish in the tank saying "Morning!" to each other. I'm not sure if only the British will get that reference but what the hell. It's not the first film-reference I've used and it definitely won't be the last. I'm rather a cinema addict to be honest. Which is why I took the shot below of the jellyfish bobbling about in the darkness, as it looked a bit like "Sphere".

I told you it wasn't going to be the last film-tie in...

In a tank outside of the main building a couple of seals were gliding serenely about. Well one was. The others were sunning on themselves on a rock in a lazy fashion. All in all it looked like they had a fairly easy life.

Lie on a rock. Go for a wee swim. Wait to be fed. Okay it's probably not the most stimulating life but at least they get tourists to investigate, which presumably keeps them amused. At least that's what I assumed from the seal above which kept swimming past the underwater window I was trying to peer through. In the end I took his picture but it was quite tricky as he was moving at quite a speed. I just kept pointing and hoping and eventually got lucky. All the others that didn't work I deleted; another one of the advantages of a digital camera.

The smaller shots scattered about this page are generic tropical fish of a type similar to those I saw in Thailand when I was doing my Open Water qualification. I never managed to get any photos from my diving as neither my digital nor film camera is waterproof, so it was nice to be able to take some representative photos even if they're in a glass tank rather than in a tropical ocean.

Actually talking of learning to dive I took the shot of the sea urchin below as it was something I definitely saw when I was diving. It's hard to make out very well in the photo but the whole thing is just a mass of needle-thin pointy spines, which you wouldn't want to get too close to.

When diving though, your respiration has an effect on your buoyancy. An air-filled vest called a BCD helps you achieve neutral buoyancy (i.e. you're neither rising nor sinking) but, as your lungs fill and empty of air as you breath, you tend to gently float up and down correspondingly. Hence when I was slowly exhaling as I floated along near the sea bottom, I gently sank. Right onto a group of those pointy spikey sea-urchins.

Thankfully I realised at the last moment, and by dint of a rapid and carefully held deep breath, I floated just over the top of them. I couldn't reach my BCD control as I was too close to the sea-urchins, but a few seconds later I was clear and able to tune my boyancy a little better. As I think I hardly need to point out, getting impaled on a bunch of those things would not have been a pleasant experience.

Lastly we have one of the things you generally don't want to see when diving. Sharks. Although I have been told that attacks are rare, "rare" does not actually equate to "does not actually happen". I blame watching Jaws as a small child. Mr Spielberg, I'm looking at you...

Up next, the scary prospect of yours-truly in a dress. Yes, it's the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. And not an average Saturday night out for those that were wondering...

© Barny Russell 2005