Diving with a Mimic Octopus!

September 17th, 2002 at 12:00am

Amazing day. Went over to Sipidan Island this morning with the American couple, David and Michelle, to do 2 dives over there. Sipidan is one of those world-famous type dive spots so you can’t say you’ve been to Kapalai and not Sipidan. Kapalai is known for the little stuff; Sipidan is known for the big guys – turtles, sharks, tuna, and barracuda.

The 2 dives we did were quite deep – 36m (117 feet) and 30 m (95 feet), that’s the deepest I’ve ever done. There was a strong current so we mainly just followed the reef wall, which by the way is over 600m deep!

The first dive was ok. I got to see my white-tipped reef sharks, grey sharks, and a big school of barracuda (maybe 100 or so).

The second dive was nothing special. We spent 20 minutes looking for hammerheads but didn?t see any so we went back to the wall to check out some turtles. It was good to actually see what the buzz is about on Sipidan, but I was very happy to come back to Kapalai. I missed having my dive buddy Thomas who I’ve been diving with for 2 days now. He already spent a week on Sipidan before coming to Kapalai so he stayed here to do his dives.

I was happy to see him again and dive with him this afternoon which we did for our third dive. And what a dive it was! INCREDIBLE! It was David and Michelle and Thomas and I and our divemaster Dundun. We only went 7m to a sandy bottom to look for seahorses. Within just a few minutes Dundun found some and David went about taking photos while Thomas and I hung around. I called Thomas over to look at something and on his way over to me he spotted a mimic octopus! At the time I had NO IDEA how rare of a sighting that is, but when I saw how excited Dundun and David were I knew it was something special.

It’s a small octopus with a head the size of a cork and skinny legs stretching out to the size of a hand. It’s special because it was actually only discovered recently, in 1998! It can mimic itself to look like anything from a lionfish to a shrimp to a snake. It was the first time anyone in our group had seen one, and Dundun has been a divemaster here for 3 years, Thomas has over 500 dives, and David has 1800 dives! So I was lucky. David said that maybe only 1000 people in the world have ever seen one.

If you want to read up more on the mimic, I found a few good links:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s357338.htm

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0920_octopusmimic.html

On top of that we saw ghost pipefish, leaf fish, cuttlefish, 2 roundbelly cowfish, one snake eel, and one prickly leatherjacket. It was the mimic though that everyone was still talking about hours later.

So 2 more dives tomorrow and then Bye-Bye Kapalai.

David and Michelle from Tampa, FL

Thomas (Germany), my dive buddy, and I

Entry Filed under: Borneo,Diving,Malaysia