What is Muck Diving?
Normally divers want to go to places, where they can find beautiful pristine reefs with a lot of different coloured fishes, nice soft and hard corals, clams and sponges. Muck Diving is something completely different.
It is called Muck Diving, because at most muck dive sites the bottom is covered with muddy or “mucky” sediment, mostly with some seaweed and algae on it. Often at muck diving sites there are no or just a few corals and sponges, but also tires, ropes and other man-made garbage. Visibility might not be as good too.
So what makes Muck Diving fascinating?
Often, when talking about Muck Diving, you get asked “Why diving over a muddy bottom could be interesting? It would be boring, a nice reef is much better!” So, the main point that makes Muck Diving so amazing and fascinating is the “mucky” environment itself. Different to the reefs, where all the animals find a lot of space to hide for protection, the species on and in this easy visible bottom must have other strategies for protection. So the easiest way for them is camouflage (and sometimes being poisonous).
Because of that, the sedimental grounds are a special habitat for a lot of rare (often small) species which, for causes of camouflage, are crazy shaped and often also strangely coulored. Sometimes they can even look like something from another planet. This is the reason why the inhabitants of these sites are often called “critters”. These critters include rare fish species like angler/frogfish, gurnards and dragonets; a lot of different kinds of shrimps or crabs; nudibranch, sea slugs and shells; seahorses and often also the different looking juvenile forms of common fish species.
Another way of diving!
Instead of “flying” over a nice reef where you mostly are looking at the whole impressive area, when Muck Diving you stay near the bottom and focus to “scan” the grounds to find the well camouflaged little stuff. This and the fact you can find rare species makes Muck Diving very popular, especially for underwater photographers and videographers. Also night dives are very interesting, when all the things, buried in the ground during the day, come out to move around and feed.
So, if this blog made you interested, come to DTL and check out our great and wonderful muck dive site Tasi Tolu with us.