Flamingo Tongue Flood
I know I make a big deal about knowing what you see “down there,” studying books, knowing what fish are where, hang out with who, are in what abundance normally. And I’m hoping that all I’m doing is collecting baseline data by counting fish when I do REEF surveys, that I’m not actually going to find a lionfish, or that I’m not actually going to see something that makes me pause and say “well, that can’t be right…” But every once in a while, something like that happens.
I’ve been doing some traveling, had the fantastic opportunity to travel and dive from St. Thomas all the way up through to Miami. Dove some beautiful places that not many other people can claim to have dove – Cay Lobos for one (if you ever have the chance…GO!) and saw a huge range of species, lionfish included unfortunately, but only from Puerto Rico north (though I hear they’ve been sighted in the BVIs!). Another thing I noticed is pictured to the left. Which, as I said, made me pause.
Flamingo Tongues (Cyphoma gibbosum) are gorgeous, people can’t really argue with that. It’s pretty interesting how little we know about them. We know that they are a gastropod, or a snail of a sort; we have a good idea that they like to feed on soft corals like the gorgonian pictured above and the sea fan below; the spotted pattern you see is not the shell, but the soft mantle of the organism living in the shell; personally, I think that octopus like to snack on them as I often see the shells scattered about the openings of known octopus dens in Saba. Other than that I can find very little on what else eats them.
Technically speaking, flamingo tongues can be categorized as parasites, munching on soft corals and giving nothing in return, though not necessarily killing the entire colonial soft coral. But then again, it depends on your definition of the soft coral. If you see the soft coral as one organism unto itself, the flamingo tongue is a parasite. However, if you see the soft coral as a collection of individual tiny organisms called polyps (which it also is), then the flamingo tongue becomes a predator, killing its prey as it goes.
But that’s a debate for another time. My concern is the over-abundance of them on certain dive sites around the Caribbean. I first saw this kind of “infestation” in St. Eustatius (Statia), in the Netherlands Antilles – otherwise known the island next door to me. It was on a weekend dive trip last July (2009) and according to the dive shop it had just started a few months back. When we had visited the previous June (2008) we saw nothing like this at the exact same dive sites. I’m currently waiting on some photos for documentation and additional details.
Like I said, I spent 3 weeks diving over 1000 miles of ocean, USVIs, BVIs, Hogsty Reef, Turks and Caicos, all up the Bahamas, and no where did I see any of this – except Mona Island off Puerto Rico. From the what I’d heard from others who’d dove there more often than me, it was isolated to two dive sites (the names escape me – but 40-60 ft / 12-18m depth on the south side). These sites are where the posted pictures came from. And on doing some research, I’ve discovered they’re also having some concerns in Bonaire, enough that they’re asking divers to do volunteer surveys to track the problem.
According to an article posted on the CEII Research station in Bonaire, the problem may be traceable back to either a) loss of predators due to overfishing that caused a chain reaction and a decrease in predators OF flamingo tongues (doesn’t mention what those predators are…), or b) run off or otherwise addition of chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorous which act as fuels for algae and “disease-bearing pathogens such as the fungus Aspergillosis sydowii” which has been known to cause Caribbean sea fan mortality. Why the flamingo tongues are more apt to predate on sick sea fans I’m not sure – its not likely that the sick sea fans are less likely to be able to run from the snails. More importantly, the flamingo tongues can also help spread the Aspergillosis.
My question to the diving world is: where else is this happening? Does anyone have any information on flamingo tongue predators? What do you know?
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Dreams of 32 degrees water amazing visibility, Wrecks, Drift, Dives, Biggest Brain Corals, the Caribbean has it all.
after a long drive or should I say slow drive right across Tobago we arrive and are met by Davey’s Cousin, (they all know each other the locals) who puts a pair of fins on dives in a swims out to a small wooden boat and brings it back to us, I do two dives at Speyside first one was a really fast drift like flying along and just steering , words of Davey ringing in my head when we reach the big brain Coral you need to go around the inside of it or we will have to abort , we reached the biggest brain coral I have ever seen and I positioned myself to tuck around the inside, perfect I was happy as I came around the corner I was greeted by the biggest Nurse Shark you have ever seen and I nearly back peddled so hard with the shock, that’s the thing with Speyside if you see something big its really big.
