I have been scuba diving for over 20 years in Hawaii and have done over 2,000 dives on almost all of the main Hawaiian Islands, and from time to time I find a critter that I just can’t identify.
My goal for a long time has been to get a picture and video clip of every known marine life species in Hawaii that lives shallower than 100 feet deep. I use all the pictures for our nonprofit Reef Guardians Hawaii as educational information for our kids at school.
You can see most of the species on our free phone application called Hawaii Sealife on the Apple store. From time to time, I find a new critter that I just can’t identify and that is very exciting. Our ocean around Hawaii is still very remote and hard to dive in and I am sure there are species still out there that us humans have yet to see.
I was diving at about 60 feet deep on a remote part of the coastline on the south side of Kauai observing a few sharks in a deep cave in the reef. Also in the cave were a few big lobsters and many red aweoweo and u‘u fish, but what caught my eye was something small and bright blue in the back of the cave.
There was a big hole in the reef right above this blue object that was about the size of a pendant in a necklace that are often sold in our jewelry stores, and I thought maybe someone had lost their jewelry while boating or kayaking. In the past, I have found all kinds of lost articles from watches, wallets to Go Pro cameras, so I was interested to see what I had found this time.
As I got close to the quarter-size bright blue object, I saw it was moving and was crawling across a bright red cave sponge. Then I knew it was alive, but I have never seen anything like it so I was super excited with the find.
This new critter was flat and highly colorful, but lacked the external gills of a sea slug called a nudibranch. But it had the same shape and movements as other sea slugs we have here in Kauai. I shot lots of video of this strange new creature with my bright dive lights so I could try to identify it when I went home.
My new bright blue cave friend turned out to be a Sphinx Phyllidia Nudibranch, which is one of the rarest creatures we have here in Kauai waters. Since finding this new creature I have found one more in a cave along the North Shore of Oahu.
The nudibranch is named after the Sphinx mythical Egyptian monster and it turns out that only a few divers have ever seen one here in Kauai. Over 65 percent of Kauai is under the waves and still explored less than the surface of the moon, so get out and go diving and see what rare critter you may find that no one else has ever seen before.
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Terry Lilley is a marine biologist living in Hanalei Kaua‘i and co-founder of Reef Guardians Hawai‘i, a nonprofit on a mission to provide education and resources to protect the coral reef. To donate to Reef Guardians Hawai‘i go to reefguardians.org
