FathomOz

From a video clip posted on YouTube during a recent visit to Taipei.

The herbal medicine street there is Dihua Street.   Shark fins, canned and dried abalone and many items we rarely see in Australia,  on sale from hundreds of small shops that are unique in Asia with Japanese era architecture.

Perhaps the most innovative product of all is dried jellyfish.

It’s not so cheap either.  (Australians regard dried seaweed as being an unusual, so jellyfish is very different)!

We can only wonder if those Asian masters of turning almost every form of sea creature into something edible could tackle making a food product from, say,  Acanthaster planci, the crown-of-thorns starfish?

That would be a challenge.

The spines have a unique poison that is very painful.  Most sea creatures leave the starfish alone. Exceptions being triton trumpet shells and  hump head maori wrasse.

There is a possibility coral trout eat juvenile crown-of-thorns.

Less coral trout = more starfish in an area.  That theory is still to be researched.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es5_j5SE_PE

Atlantic lobster taken from a fish tank and cooked in a Taiwanese restaurant.  Very nice but not equal to Australian mud crab.  Above video picture February 2010

Meat in Atlantic lobster nipper was spongy yet tasty.

Cooked with special AO sauce it was a rare treat.

Australian rock lobster do not have pincer nippers.

Warning: There’s a serious problem with eating excessive “rich” foods such as lobster, my late naturopath told me 25 years ago.   It causes Aseptic bone necrosis. This is a dying of the bone enamel in the joints (hips shoulder, knees).   Professional divers get it …… (too many lobsters?)

As do astronauts  (too many cocktail parties?).

Medical diving practitioners (circa 1970′s) believed it is due to poor decompression times…. which is an easy diagnosis to make on  divers.

The fact that other non divers have it  (wife of celebrity radio shock jock), points to the food rather than deco stops in my opinion.  Or both.

Hip joint replacement (a serious medical procedure) would be another treatment.

Eat more beans!

(Click picture to enlarge it).

Fish Rock Cave was once home to magnificent and now protected species like this.

When first efforts were made to protect this stunning scuba diving site from spear fishing, a Newcastle club waged ‘war’ by holding a spearing competition under the nose of local scuba divers.   It did not win them any points and in time they lost their battle.  Responsible spear fishing today, is another matter and part of the evolution.  Giant groper were also speared at this location.  (from John Harding’s Aquarius documentary).

Originally published in Wade Doak’s DIVE New Zealand magazine, these pictures show what free diving was doing in the late 1960′s.

Far left pictures (upper and lower) feature the late Captain Wally Muller – stalking and bagging a blue spot coral trout in the Swain Reefs 1967.   Wally Muller was a professional fisherman who became a free diver – a very unusual thing. Pro fishermen see lots of shark action and most would not dream of diving.  To them it was a realm of guaranteed doom, in the 1960′s at least.  Large blue spot coral trout would be a good source of ciguatera, the tasteless and odorless toxin present in many tropical fish predators.

Other pictures show Bob Grounds at Yeppoon, Queensland offshore coral formations.  The coral and speargun picture was an intentional copy of a famous Ben Cropp/Ron Taylor image.  In both examples a home made speargun is shown.

The Spanish Mackerel picture was from the era when some sponsorship was being made to divers.  In this example it was Evinrude outboard motors and Sea Hornet spear guns.   Sea Hornet assisted the production of “John Harding’s Aquarius” by supplying 3000 feet of 16mm color film.

Bob Grounds holds one of the final Blue Groper at Shark Island, Cronulla (Sydney) before they were banned from capture by spear fishing.  The picture was published in Sydney’s The Sun newspaper with a page 3 headline “Don’t Say You Were Not Warned”.