Flotsam & Jetsam

Antibiotic Confusion. Ben admits to making an editing error in our monthly newsletter. Travel Advice from Lynda Durfee should have read, "generic Keflex and a Z-pack". Keflex is Cephalexin. A Z-Pak is azithromycin. They are two different antibiotics. We thank all those that wrote in to tell us.

Cooper's Treasures. Astronaut Gordon Cooper created a map of the ocean floor to identify Cold War nuclear threats, but today it's being used for finding centuries-old wrecks. Already, experts have identified five colonial period wreck sites. An anchor dated between 1492 and 1550 and likely to have come from a vessel the size of one of those used by Columbus has been discovered in the Turks & Caicos Islands and was featured on Discovery Channel.

DAN Mileage Restriction. We erred when we reported the 50-mile (80km) restriction to DAN cover. After trawling through the DAN Insurance Handbook, it appears that restriction applies to diving vacation cancellation, non-diving accident medical insurance, diving vacation interruption benefit and Travel Assist benefit on the basic member's policy, not actual diving accidents.

You Swallowed What? You certainly swallowed seawater while diving, but there's more to it than water? Photographer David Littschwager photographed a handful of seawater and magnified it 25 times. In the few drops of water captured off Kona, Hawaii, he encountered larvae of marine worms, cyanobacteria that help to produce oxygen, crab larvae, copepods (a shrimp-like crustacean that is a food source for many fish), fish eggs, and chaetognaths -- a predatory form of zooplankton that can inject a paralytic venom. It doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Maybe next time you're in the water, please keep your mouth shut!

Fake News Again. More than 13 million people clicked on YouTube footage of an 'adult film' actress getting bitten by a shark during a film shoot off West Palm Beach, but it seems to have been a contrived publicity stunt. Bryce Roher of Florida Shark Diving says he had been contacted previously by the company, saying it wanted to stage the shark bite. He wanted no part of it. Ryan Walton of Deep Obsession Charters said it was obviously faked and was shocked that so many news outlets picked up on it, but that "the shock factor made you want to believe it." He points out that the girl was inside a cage yet the cameraman was not.

Cayman Cruelty. The Telegraph reports that Carnival Cruise Line, one of the world's biggest cruise companies, has come under fire for sending tens of thousands of its passengers every year on excursions to the Cayman Turtle Center: Island Wildlife Encounter, where endangered turtles are allegedly subjected to appalling living conditions and are exploited in the name of tourist entertainment, including as props for selfies.

Shark Attacks California Diver's Kayak. Are you one of those divers who uses a kayak to get to where you want to dive? Brian Correiar was doing exactly that in Monterey Bay on May 28 when his kayak was attacked by a great white shark. Video taken from the shore shows him swimming carefully backwards as the shark started to swim toward him with his kayak still lodged in his jaws. Unable reach the Coast Guard with his VHF/GPS, he was pulled from the water by a passing yacht captain.

First Female Pakistani Diving Instructor. Life can be fairly limited for women in Muslim-dominated Pakistan, but Rosheen Khan has broken those invisible barriers to become the country's first female diving instructor. Featured in a documentary by Nameera Ahmed, made with the intention of breaking stereotypes, she recounted how her employer at the Karachi Scuba Diving Center, Yousuf Ali, had encouraged her, and now she teaches scuba diving internationally.

Calling Underwater Photographers. The Wetpixel Shootout will be held mid-June 2018 and will again pitch two teams head-to-head in an underwater photography contest at Gulen in Norway. Alex Mustard will be captaining the Lembeh Team and Kei Wilk the Gulen team. Both teams are actively recruiting members to participate. Contact www.gulendiveresort.com or www.lembehresort.com

The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish has not gone away. Now that we've focused on coral bleaching, we should remember that the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish are munching their way through what's left of the Great Barrier Reef. The problem has always been how to destroy them without helping them to propagate by division. Now tests by researchers at James Cook University have established that injecting each animal with a shot of commonly available vinegar causes them to die within 48 hours, with no impact on other marine life. Problem is, it takes a lot of diver hours to cover much territory.

How Many Divers Are There? Subscriber Ron Johnson (Katy, TX) recently went on a trip with several dive store owners to the Philippines. They were lamenting that Millennials didn't want to learn to dive, only to check scuba off their bucket lists. They also all agreed that there were less than a million active divers in the world. What do you think? BenDDavison@undercurrent.org

Do Statue Parks Divert Attention from Bigger Issues? Robert Iglesias Priet, a researcher from the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology near Cancun, Mexico, thinks so. He also believes tourists are to blame for deterioration on Cancun's reefs, due to the threat of pollution caused by waste water discharged from the hotels. This is resulting in algae increasingly covering the coral as well as the museum of sculptures. While the 7,700 square miles of the Great Barrier Reef attract close to a million visitors every year, the national park in Cancun covers only 33 square miles, yet has nearly 750,000 visitors each year. The museum diverted a third of these away from the coral, but the pollution threat continues.