OP
EnronX
Contributor
Thanks for the responses everyone...we are now here in Curacao but I was able to talk to Steven the dive master at BD&A this morning just before our flight.
When I told him the story he actually started laughing and said that we were fortunate that it ended like it did. He said we were even lucky compared to one encounter he had with another ~6 foot turtle. At 110 feet off the East side of Klein he told me that he and Waldo (another DM) had a turtle come out of the blue and went immediately after his camera! He said they could not get it to stop coming after the refraction on the lens and it was a very scary experience for both of them. On his encounter the turtle actually opened its beak to grab it and tried to pull away the camera out of his hands...wow
Evidently the big turtles, especially untagged and not familiar with humans, assume that the reflection in our masks (and refractions of the lenses in cameras) make them very curious and tantalizing objects. Steven's guess as to why the Hawksbill kept coming after my mask was that the turtle thought it was squid.
My mask is actually a black mask with a magenta lens, and my girlfriend’s was a clear skirt with blue outline, and he tried to get at both of them so who knows what on Earth he was thinking. I did a quick google search on Hawksbills behavior with humans and it does say on a BBC website that aggressive behavior towards humans has been previously observed.
When we get back to the States I intend to do quite a bit more research, obviously
When I told him the story he actually started laughing and said that we were fortunate that it ended like it did. He said we were even lucky compared to one encounter he had with another ~6 foot turtle. At 110 feet off the East side of Klein he told me that he and Waldo (another DM) had a turtle come out of the blue and went immediately after his camera! He said they could not get it to stop coming after the refraction on the lens and it was a very scary experience for both of them. On his encounter the turtle actually opened its beak to grab it and tried to pull away the camera out of his hands...wow
Evidently the big turtles, especially untagged and not familiar with humans, assume that the reflection in our masks (and refractions of the lenses in cameras) make them very curious and tantalizing objects. Steven's guess as to why the Hawksbill kept coming after my mask was that the turtle thought it was squid.
My mask is actually a black mask with a magenta lens, and my girlfriend’s was a clear skirt with blue outline, and he tried to get at both of them so who knows what on Earth he was thinking. I did a quick google search on Hawksbills behavior with humans and it does say on a BBC website that aggressive behavior towards humans has been previously observed.
When we get back to the States I intend to do quite a bit more research, obviously
As EnronX point out turtles are generally aloof or avoid encounters. However, it is a reminder that, as divers, we're simply visitors and that that animal behavior ulltimately is unpredictable.
