Fish feeding??

[Rod]

The original post said we feed them bread. Not seen too many natural loaves underwater

[John Gulliver]

Now that's another matter! I thought you were opposed to feeding fish anything at all.

[Jen]

Originally Posted by londonsean69

It encourages people to do more diving

My daughter did her DSD 2 years ago in Australia where the instructors fed the fish. She said that the number of fish that suddenly appeared overwhelmed her and her stress levels went through the roof. I haven't been able to get her back in the water since.

[sidthejedi]

Seen plenty of people smashing open sea urchins to feed the wrasse, and whilst it is cool to see it once it gets a bit boring. Also if I'm on a rummage dive half the fun is trying to find all the fish and other cool stuff. It doesn't seem quite right when you have a wrasse following you like an eager puppy, waiting hopefully for you to feed it.

[Narced at sea level]

I had a fascinating and hilarious experience on the Thistlegorm last year.

while bimbling round the bomb covers so I could clock a full hour on the wreck before ascending (I have a thing about clocking 60 minutes on every dive - sad I know), a little wrasse came over to me and started nudging the little bits of dead coral strewn around, I swear it was looking at me too. It was a real "what is it Lassie?" moment.
So I flipped over one of the bits of coral, and sure enough the little wrasse nipped in and started nibbling at whatever it could find under the coral, after a minute or two it started nudging at another bit of coral, and looking at me again.

was I feeding the fish?
was its behaviour a learned one - associating divers with food?
or was it a natural behaviour and these fish naturally follow larger animals around and pick off scraps that get disturbed by them?
was my behaviour any different to divers deliberately feeding fish?

who knows - but it made for a memorable dive and got me thinking, so I guess I'm in favour of the "in moderation" argument.

[Richard Mason]

Originally Posted by sidthejedi

Seen plenty of people smashing open sea urchins to feed the wrasse, and whilst it is cool to see it once it gets a bit boring. Also if I'm on a rummage dive half the fun is trying to find all the fish and other cool stuff. It doesn't seem quite right when you have a wrasse following you like an eager puppy, waiting hopefully for you to feed it.

This is fairly regular here in Tasmania. In recent years, we've had a big increase in black sea urchins, a beastie normally found much further to our north but they've spread south since the 80s along the East Coast; possibly global warming rlated possibly as a result of overfishing for crayfish etc.. They do enormous damage here, eating out all the kelp and forming sea urchin "barrens", which are pretty lifeless.

Class Echinoidea

Where we see them on a dive, we usually spend a few minutes with the big F/O knife going the smash, slash, bash and stab. Thus inevitably results in a bit of a feeding frenzy. When I lived on the NE coast, I was involved in a State-Govt funded Coastcare project where they paid for our air etc, so we could go out on a Sunday morning with a big spike and do this in areas where they were experimenting with the regeneration of Giant Kelp. The fish soon got to know to follow us around after this.

RichardM.