Opalescent Squid Mating Aggregation

[doubtingGunnel]

You remember those few days of incredible viz at the end of June? Yeah, me too. On one of those days I had the most amazing dive of my life so far. We started off at the entry point of Three Tree to head down to the tire reef. We we got down to about 30 fsw and did a double take. Not one but two Spiny Dogfish. But why?

We looked ahead and saw what I initially thought to be schooling fish. It turned out to be a huge mating aggregation of Opalescent Squid. Hundreds and hundreds of them all mating and laying eggs in a huge cluster. We spent the entire time just watching (and frantically filming). They didn't care a single bit about our presence.At some point we disappointedly looked at our gauges and decided we better head up the slope and do a safety stop. I think we spent about an hour at 40 fsw.

As I said, best dive of my life.

Now for the technical stuff:
Filmed with a Canon 5D MKIII, 8-15mm f/4, Aquatica housing, Sola 4000 lights and Magic Lantern RAW. Some shots are wide at 15mm and some are narrow with Magic Lantern's crop mode.

Magic Lantern is an amazing add on to the Canon 5D MKIII. It let me film wide with my fisheye at 15mm and then zoom in with a crop mode, effectively making my focal length 45mm without any loss of detail. The post processing was painful but wonderful at the same time. I did the initial footage grading in Lightroom. It was like editing a RAW photo. Huge amounts of latitude, white balance control,etc. Then off to TIFF and into Premiere. It's storage intense and time consuming but so so worth it.

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[deep diver]

That was some great filming and a wonderful experience

[Jan K]

Awesome ! What an experience. Thanks for sharing .

[ljjames]

Amazing and jaw droppingly beautiful!!

[Tom Nic]

Wonderful!

[seattlepaul1975]

Awesome video thanks for sharing

[Dusty2]

Wow! A once in a lifetime opportunity well exploited!

[nwscubamom]

Absolutely jaw-droppingly STUNNING!! (and you did a great sound track to go with it..very fitting).
So what's interesting to me is that Three Tree seems to be year after year where divers see this mating and egg-laying frenzy. I even have a photo from 10 years ago, possibly even that same mooring line? with eggs on it.
Ya gotta wonder if they go back to the same sites to lay their eggs, much like ling cod do?
Also interesting to note is that the same thing is happening down in California right now - their squid are doing the mating thing as well.
COOL STUFF!
- Janna : )

[YellowEye]

Epic!

[Jeremy]

What a privilege to see - thank you for sharing this