The snorkelling in Santiago was the best.
The water was much warmer so we could stay in for longer.
And see lots of fish.
And fishing sea lions.
Which are very cute.
These guys were diving down into a hole so that all you could see was their bubbles until they came up for air.
They don’t usually dive very deep, at least not the ones we saw.
But they are very fast in the water.
And playful.
And curious about us.
This one was chasing and diving around Matt for quite a while.
Kerri kept poking him to get his attention, but he didn’t see it.
Finally Matt pulled his head out of the water and said “what”. The sea lion popped his head out too and sat right behind Matt with this expression.
Kerri yelled “eee ion…eee ion….eeeeeee ion!” through her snorkel.
Then Matt saw him, which is good, because he had the camera.
This is a Galapagos barracuda. They are small and very funny looking.
There were more big schools of fish.
And a big eagle ray.
There were a couple of white tipped sharks too, but the pictures aren’t nearly as good as the ones from SCUBA.
The host found the remains of a dead lobster. The parts looked funny floating back down to the bottom.
Another big school of tiny fish.
This is Kerri and school of tiny fish.
This is a random red thing Matt decided to take a picture of.
This is a random blue thing Matt decided to take a picture of.
This is a mexican hogfish.
This is a very spiky urchin.
This is a yellow starfish. There weren’t many of these. Most of the starfish were blue or the red spiky ones or the many armed ones.
This is a blenny.
This is an island major . It was unimpressed by the camera.
This is a king angelfish.
This is a female or juvenile mexican hogfish (the male is above with the weird bump on his head).
This is a scorpionfish.
But the best part was the penguins.
They circled by 3 times.
A whole big group of them.
They are really, really fast.
They came shooting by under us while we were snorkelling.
Then they got lost in the bubble and I couldn’t really see them anymore.
But they came back again.
Maybe they liked me as much as I liked them.
Or maybe they just didn’t get enough fish the first time.
But they seemed to be having fun.
And they were very cute.
From now on the Zoo is going to be so boring for you guys. I enjoy being on a virtual trip with you. Especially with all the fishes. The random red thing is a christmas tree worm (and just below it is a lizardfish). The random blue thing is a sponge (and the red fish are cardinalfish). I just used the king angelfish in my bioinformatics class last week. It speciated from the very similar queen angelfish in the Caribbean after the Panama land mass was pushed up to separate the Atlantic from the Pacific oceans.