Underwater Website Links
| general | Australia |
photography |
Egypt |
| nudibranchs | Japan |
| New Zealand | |
| The Philippines | |
| The Solomon Islands | |
| United States |
General
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FishBase
|
When I visited in March of 2004, this extraordinary fish database claimed to
be getting around 9 million hits a month, and to have 35900 photos of 28400
species of fish. It's an excellent way of identifying fish,
either by following the
"identification" link at the top of the front page, or by typing a
family name like "butterflyfish" into the
"common name" field on the front page. The site is definitely
slanted towards academic research, but it has some wonderful photos in
the Best Photos
of the Month section. It allows you to search in several
different languages, including Russian, Greek and Arabic. Last
visited in April of 2006.
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FINS
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Billing
itself as the "Fish Information Service", this website has a database with
hundreds of good photos of fish and other marine life, listed by type of
fish, by common name and by Latin name. The marine
fish by type sections have very good photo galleries of all the types
of fish belong to different families, like "angelfish", "eels", "sharks"
and so on, making identification of unknown fish a breeze.
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Scuba Equipment USA
|
This scuba equipment retailer wouldn't rate a mention except for their excellent
marine
species gallery, with separate sections for fish, crustaceans, nudibranchs
(197 images at 30 images per page), anemones, corals, mammals and other
categories of life from around the world. The species accounts
have the best write-up of any website I've seen anywhere. Last
visited in April of 2006.
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Ryan Photographic
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Like me, Paddy Ryan is a New Zealander now living in the United States. His website doesn't
have information about the photos apart from the name of the animal, but there are worthwhile galleries of
crustaceans,
sea cucumbers,
sea stars,
sea urchins,
cephalopods,
bivalve molluscs,
sea slugs and snails,
sponges and
worms.
Click the photo to see the gallery. Last visited in January of 2011.
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Reef Images
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This website has great photo galleries which can help you identify various types of creature including sea cucumbers. |
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Marine Life Images
|
This stock photography website contains galleries of photos from the Pacific
Ocean, the Caribbean and the Galapagos Islands (funny, I thought they were
in the Pacific!). The website isn't as slick as some others,
but the galleries can certainly be useful if you need to identify something
you've seen.
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Yahoo underwater life website links
|
A categorized list of about 650 websites devoted to all facets of underwater life. |
Photography
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underwaterphotography.com
|
The
name is a mouthful, but this is a useful website, with forums,
a for
sale section, and articles covering topics like
underwater digital photography and
the
rise and eventual demise of the Nikonos underwater camera system, which
for many years was the only way to do underwater photography.
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|
The World of Steve Norvich
|
This person's website is very well done, with trip reports from about 15 Pacific dive sites and 6 Caribbean sites. He also has several pages devoted to underwater photography techniques. |
Nudibranchs
| Poppe
images |
See
the
description of the Poppe Images website. |
| Scuba
Equipment USA |
See
the
description of the Scuba Equipment USA website. |
| Opistobranchs
from ... Elsewhere |
Opistobranchs
are sea slugs or nudibranchs. I didn't want to immediately
present you with the whole name of this website because I thought it might
put you off - it's called "Opistobranchs from the Mediterranean and Elsewhere",
which is a silly name, since "the Mediterranean and Elsewhere" is everywhere,
isn't it? Anyway, as you can tell it's obviously spread its
wings, because it's now got nudibranchs from all over the world.
It might also be offputting to learn that this website is based in Germany,
but in fact it has dual German and English sections. The photo
galleries are really well put together, and exceptionally useful when you're
looking for a particular sea slug, but there's no description of the species
in the galleries. |
| Marli
Wakeling |
Marli
Wakeling's website has galleries from her foreign trips, featuring
life both above water and below the surface. The site includes
a
nudibranch photo gallery with a total of 181 thumbnail photos displayed
at 40 thumbnails per page, together with the scientific name of each species.
The photos are gorgeous in their own right and it's useful also if you
want to identify nudibranchs that you've seen. Last visited
in November of 2008. |
| Dive-Oz
nudibranch galleries |
See
the
description of the Dive-Oz website. |
| Sea
Slug Forum |
This
website sponsored by the Australian Museum Online is oriented towards the
scientific community rather than lay people and, as with many such biology
websites, it provides a
large linked list of nudibranchs rather than a gallery, which makes
using this website for identification very tiresome. The main
value for regular people is likely to be the
forums, where you can post photos of nudibranchs to enquire about what
species they are, and the
long and well-annotated list of other nudibranch websites. |
Australia
| Dive-Oz |
"Oz"
is a slang term for "Australia", and Dive-Oz claims to be Australia's biggest
scuba diving website. It's a bit patchy but the
discussion forums seem fairly active and specialized parts like the
nudibranch galleries are fairly well done, with 12 pages each containing
12 thumbnail photos - but the enlarged photos are only 300 pixels wide.
Last visited in April of 2006.
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Egypt
| Geographia:
Diving Sinai |
This
section of the Geographia travel website contains information about dive
sites around the Sinai Peninsula. There isn't a lot of
information, but it's worthwhile as an introduction. The photo
gallery of Red Sea fish has too few photos to make it a useful resource,
and the photos are far too small to make it worth much time browsing.
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Japan
|
Bob
Bolland's Okinawa Sea Slug website |
Yes, it's what you've been waiting for all your life, but thought you'd never see - a website dedicated to the nudibranchs of Okinawa! It also has links to other more general nudibranch websites. |
New Zealand
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WhaleWatch
|
WhaleWatch
is a marine life tourism company very professionally operated by a local
group of New Zealand's indigenous people, the Maori. Situated
at Kaikoura, on the North East Coast of the South Island, they run regular
boat trips off the coast to watch some of the sperm whales which are year-round
residents of this area. Using microphones to locate the whales as
they dive to great depths for squid, it's almost guaranteed that visitors
will be able to see the whales. Although professionally done
and with good graphics, the website is fairly slow and geared towards a
very small screen size. Last visited in January of 2008.
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The Philippines
|
Poppe images
|
This
very professionally presented website is set up as a stock photography
business, but has a great deal to offer people who don't want to buy anything.
There are a huge number of photos of underwater wildlife, laid out in very
easy to navigate photo galleries - an excellent resource for identifying
critters you've seen, such as fish and
nudibranchs.
There's also brief information about various dive sites. Last
visited in December of 2005.
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Solomon Islands
|
Taucher.Net
|
How's your German? After seven wasted years of study, mine's not too bad, so I was able to glean quite a bit from this German language website devoted to wreck diving, which has a section on the Solomon Islands. |
| United
States LST Association |
The United States LST Association is dedicated to the preservation of artifacts related to the LST or "landing ship, tank". They even have an operating example of an American World War Two LST. |
United States
|
Hawaii Coral Reef Network
|
This excellent website has photographs and text of Hawaiian marine life, grouped by taxonomic family. One little quibble is that it's not completely obvious how to get to the photographs from the front page, since the large black text at the bottom - "seaweeds", "invertebrates" and "fish" aren't underlined, and therefore don't look like links. |