While snorkeling with a friend visiting from Canada, I spotted a tiny porcupine pufferfish resting on the ocean floor in about 6 feet of water. Read more
Reader Mark Hamamoto emailed that while kayaking off Makua beach, he saw a spiderlike creature skimming over the surface of the water about 200 yards from shore. “Any idea what this is?” Mark wrote. “Never seen this before.” Read more
In some ways Alaska and Hawaii are worlds apart. But after my weeklong work with Pacific golden plovers in Nome, I learned that we also have much in common. Read more
When I told kolea researcher Wally Johnson that I wished I could spend my summer solstice birthday in Alaska, he invited me to join his plover study team. Read more
As much as I loved swimming with millions of lovely, pulsing salps last week, their gelatinous bodies obscured the hard and soft corals below. Read more
This week I swam with several million of the weirdest and most captivating animals off Orpheus Island in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Read more
I’ve just flown to Townsville, Australia, where we now keep our sailboat, Honu. Read more
Finding several brittle stars while snorkeling this week reminded me of an invertebrate zoology class I took long ago at University of Hawaii at Manoa. Read more
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Bangladesh is one of the last places you would expect to hear hundreds of schoolchildren shouting, “Aloha!” but it’s happening in a town called Dinajpur. Read more
Few seabirds get their own annual party, but then, white terns are not your average seabirds. Read more
Last year several readers who live along Kaneohe Bay wrote that large green sea turtles were hanging out at the shoreline of their waterfront homes. Read more
Plover admirers, this is the week to wish your neighborhood kolea safe travels. Read more
Trumpet snails are one of the crown-of-thorns starfish’s few predators. Read more
Samoan crabs are so popular here that the state protects the population by law. Read more
It’s a fish-eat-fish world out on the reef, so seeing one species chase another isn’t usually a sight that has my heart pounding as I fumble for my camera. But this time the predator was scary and the prey poisonous. Read more
Opal seaweed is native to the warm Indian, Pacific and western Atlantic oceans, growing from tide pools to waters 150 feet deep. It’s also native to Hawaii, meaning it got here without a lift from human hands or hulls, drifting hundreds or even thousands of miles to our islands. Read more
Nudibranchs are snails without shells. The common name of these animals is sea slugs. Read more
With about 2,000 species, gobies form the largest fish family in the world. Read more
Besides meeting some of the friendliest people on the planet here, it’s the only place where money is as big as manta rays. Read more