Experienced Diver Feeding Big Fishes At The Bottom Of The Sea

Experienced Diver Feeding Big Fishes At The Bottom Of The Sea , irst we should consider some reasons that a biologist might want to point a camera at a fish that’s still swimming free in the water. It’s pretty easy to understand the utility of something like, say, recording a video of behaviors of a nesting bass, but the possibilities extend far beyond that. While discussing uses in the world of research, the ability to capture photos or video while in the field doing snorkel surveys can be invaluable.

As an example of the value of having a camera handy, while working on a snorkel survey for rare darters in Virginia, I happened to take note of a Nocomis chub that somehow looked out of place. The fish happened to be residing in a deep pool under heavy canopy cover that made it so dark that still photography was impossible and I couldn’t see well enough to make a proper ID.

Instead, I was able to record a 10 second video clip which I then played back frame by frame until I got enough of a view to determine the identity of the fish. As it turns out, I’d made the first observation of an introduced population of Bluehead Chubs (Nocomis leptocephalus) in the upper Tennessee drainage in Virginia, and it quite possibly would’ve been missed altogether without a short video clip.