By guest blogger Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel
Image by Adam J.W.C
The upscale suburb of Mosman, Sydney sits on the lower north shore of Sydney Harbor, and it’s got some of the highest real estate prices in the southern hemisphere. The people who pay so much to live here enjoy spectacular views of Sydney Harbor, a neighborhood filled with eucalyptus trees teeming with parrots and high-end restaurants, but few of them realize that their home is also host to a variety of fascinating marine organisms just a few feet off the beach, under the pier at Clifton Gardens in Chowder Bay.
A shark net on the inside of the pier eases the minds of swimmers who fear the (nonexistent) dangerous sharks, while also providing a substrate for seahorses to hang onto. You can find them here in several color variants, from yellow to black with red eyes. In the summertime, these unusual fishes mate, and quirkily, it’s the male seahorse that becomes pregnant. A few weeks after the female deposits her eggs in his pouch, with some luck, it’s possible to see the minuscule baby seahorses emerge from the breeding pouch of their father.
Seahorses are not the only ones who choose Clifton Gardens as their breeding spot; small cuttlefish, which are not fish, but cephalopods, prowl the area in pairs, and lucky divers can sometimes observe their vigorous mating activity (see the video below).
The wooden pylons of the pier are covered with a dense layer of beautiful sponges and tunicates. Boxfish, dwarf lionfish, several species of pipefish, nudibranchs and moray eels round off the macro extravaganza. Once in a while a group of jacks makes the rounds, looking for a meal among the yellowtail scads in mid-water. In the warmer part of the year, fish from more tropical parts of the Australian east coast settle in the Sydney area, and during El Nino years they stay with us longer. Then, an occasional butterflyfish and several cornetfish make the space between the pylons of the Clifton pier their home.
But the undisputed star of Chowder Bay is Battlecat, a frogfish so named by my dive buddy Gaetano. This imposing — well, for frogfish standards — striated frogfish has served as a model for so many of my underwater photography friends that he has his own Facebook page now. And he’s not the only frogfish in Clifton Gardens, with several species and color variants making the area their home. And although visibility isn’t great — in the words of my friend Gaetano, “first the viz was one meter, then it got bad” — it’s muck diving, so you don’t need to see far to enjoy macro subjects. And sometimes when the viz is good there are really nice “cathedral” light effects from the pylons. Clifton Gardens is a muck diver’s paradise, right in the middle of a cosmopolitan city.
