Do you touch?

[fishb0y]

Here you go, the science and the photos: http://www.sei.org/touch.html

So I stand corrected, but I have yet to see "handprints" in coral. Again, are you willing to tell me that scuba divers are causing reef systems to die?

I do not see the impact of the average scuba diver doing such great damage to the ocean's reef systems. If they do in fact cause such wide spread damage, why would you participate in such an activity?

 

[Phil TK]

Some countries have banned the use of dive gloves to protect their reefs. This is an excellent move, more should implement such a ban.

I have to disagree with you there, I consider gloves an important part of my dive kit and every time I see a hand injury I'm grateful for wearing them. I've defied these glove bans in various places and resent the implications when people tell me not to wear them -often in frank terms.
Last season my girlfriend cut her hand badly on a mooring line and a german friend put his hand on a spiny fish (unknown type) whilst doing a skill circuit. Both injurys might have been prevented by wearing gloves, both injurys resulted in no diving for over a week. Both divers now wear gloves!
I do wonder why people think a gloves ban stops people touching things, from what I've seen it makes no difference. There is no evidence that wearing them encourages people to touch things and anyway you don't need gloves for example to pick up a sea cucumber and make it 'ejaculate'-which seems very popular thesedays (I get fed up seeing this antic). A proper warning about deliberate 'touching' should be in the dive briefing with a threat to cancel dive 2 for any miscreants -and that's all you can do really.
Phil TK

 

[Diver0001]

I have to disagree with you there, I consider gloves an important part of my dive kit

Personally, I'm in favor of these kinds of measures. I think areas that get a lot of dive traffic have to do what they can to protect their corals.

And there is absolutely no reason to resent this. You're looking at the world from outside in, putting yourself in the centre of the picture. People making these rules don't know you. You're only one of millions of divers to them and they have much bigger problems to worry about than how you feel about it, like the impact of millions of divers on their reefs.

R..

 

[MSilvia]

I'll sometimes touch, but I'm often hunting, and rarely anywhere near a coral reef. I don't think granite is impacted much by me molesting it.

"Never touch" sounds fine, but there are too many reasonable exceptions to "never".

 

[miketsp]

Prove me wrong, but star fish do not have brains... hence they wouldn't know where they are anyhow. They are simple animals, not Romba vacuum cleaners.

They might not know where they are but they do know where they've been.
There have been a lot of studies done on starfish foraging patterns and they are actually quite sophisticated in order to optimise collection of nutrients from a substrate.

They don't have a brain but they do have a nervous system. There is a radial nerve running the length of each ray and a circumoral nerve ring that connects the radial nerves. The nerve ring doesn't seem to do any kind of processing of information and all the sensory information must go to the radial nerves, any memories must be stored in the radial nerves, and any decisions about what to do must be made in the radial nerves.

This arrangement still lets them detect food, odors, mates and learn to associate particular textures of substrate (gravel vs. sand, for example) or levels of illumination (light or dark) with the presence of food.
Feeding behaviors are the easiest to train and observe, so most learning experiments have concentrated on these.

Anyway coming back to the original comment, just lifting the starfish, rotating it and putting it back on top of a just swept (depleted of food) area is a situation that the starfish could take several hours to recover from.

 

[Phil TK]

And there is absolutely no reason to resent this. You're looking at the world from outside in, putting yourself in the centre of the picture.

Well pardon me, but I'm simply putting my own safety and welfare at the centre of the picture -which I'm entitled to do, as long of course it doesn't affect anybody or anything else, which it doesn't. If my welfare is compromised for what I think is a very silly reason then I can quite easily resent it thanks.
We are not going to protect reefs by banning gloves -it's all down to education which as I said previously, is down to dive guides.
People pick up and touch things without gloves -this is why I regard the ban as silly.
Phil TK

 

[Diver0001]

Well pardon me, but I'm simply putting my own safety and welfare at the centre of the picture -which I'm entitled to do, as long of course it doesn't affect anybody or anything else, which it doesn't. If my welfare is compromised for what I think is a very silly reason then I can quite easily resent it thanks.
We are not going to protect reefs by banning gloves -it's all down to education which as I said previously, is down to dive guides.
People pick up and touch things without gloves -this is why I regard the ban as silly.
Phil TK

Brilliant. I've been looking for a good slap-down-drag-out stomping all week..... <drops gloves>

Safety, Phil?

If you're not touching anything then your hands aren't going to get injured, are they?

And if your hands get injured then you're touching something.....

If you ask me this rule was *made* for you. *You* are the coral killing bastrd that they're trying to stop.... LOL

<ok, your turn>

R..

 

[Ishie]

I'm mixed on the glove thing. In the Philippines, we weren't allowed to wear gloves (except at one site, but none of us had gloves there because we didn't think we were allowed to use them).

They did have the glass poles so you could do plenty of damage if you wanted to.

Now, I wasn't into touching anything, but I did get nailed on the thumb by a churned up chunk of box jelly that I never even saw and it touched me; I didn't touch it, but OW!

 

[Bruciebabe]

Brilliant. I've been looking for a good slap-down-drag-out stomping all week..... <drops gloves>

Safety, Phil?

If you're not touching anything then your hands aren't going to get injured, are they?

And if your hands get injured then you're touching something.....

If you ask me this rule was *made* for you. *You* are the coral killing bastrd that they're trying to stop.... LOL

<ok, your turn>

R..

Exactly right.

 

[Bruciebabe]

So I stand corrected, but I have yet to see "handprints" in coral. Again, are you willing to tell me that scuba divers are causing reef systems to die?

I do not see the impact of the average scuba diver doing such great damage to the ocean's reef systems. If they do in fact cause such wide spread damage, why would you participate in such an activity?

I am educated and skilled enough not to touch anything.
And to know the importance of not wearing gloves on the reef, not fish feeding etc.