Diving Aquarius Bonaire | The Shore Dive Collection | TropicLens - 4K

The shear amount and diversity of sea life at Aquarius has pushed it up into our top five dive sites on Bonaire. There were so many first time captures here, we had to make a separate video just to handle the overflow! (Check out our Aquarius After Dark Dive Highlight video.) The ones we highlight here include a deep reef scorpionfish, arrow shrimp, jewel urchin, red glass-hair chiton, hemipolygona, lynx phidiana and an Atlantic longarm octopus.

The shallows are super easy for snorkeling and with a few sitting areas in the sand, Aquarius is a perfect site for divers and non-divers to spend a morning, afternoon or early evening to catch the sunset.

If you dive Aquarius, please add a comment and let us know what you saw there.

We want to encourage more shore diving, so this video provides some guidance where the site is, how to dive it and what you may see there. If you want to skip to or review specific topics, the section timings are below.

UNCOMMON SEA LIFE AND FIRST TIME CAPTURE IDENTIFICATION

We primarily use two sources to validate sea life we don’t recognize. The first is Florent's Guide To TheTropical Reefs which can be found at https://reefguide.org. Its free and has lots of pictures, but is not comprehensive. The second is “The Reef Set: Reef Fish, Reef Creature and Reef Coral (3 Volumes)”. The box set can be found on Amazon; however with all our travels, we also purchased the eBooks (http://fishid.com/store/product-categ...) so we don’t have to carry an extra five pounds of paper in our luggage. :-) We also reference other sources from time to time as well.

Here are some links to more information/images about animals from this video.

Deepreef Scorpionfish - https://biogeodb.stri.si.edu/caribbea...
Arrow Shrimp - https://www.inaturalist.org/guide_tax...
Jewel Urchin - https://reefguide.org/lytechinuswilli...
Red Glass-Hair Chiton - https://www.reeflex.net/tiere/6810_Ac...
Hemipolygona - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemipol...
Lynx Phidiana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phidian...
Atlantic Longarm Octopus - https://octonation.com/octopedia/atla...

STINAPA’s SCTLD Updates - https://stinapabonaire.org/bonaire-na...


CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:42 Site Background/Description
4:40 Site Logistics
7:53 Dive Profile
12:46 Sea Life - Night
16:13 Sea Life - Day


CAMERA EQUIPMENT

Underwater Camera - iPhone 14 Pro Max
Underwater Housing - Divevolk SeaTouch 4 Max
Underwater Lights - Kraken Hydra 8000 WRGBU
Camera App - Apple iOS Camera App
Land Camera - iPhone 14 Pro Max
Driving Camera - GoPro Hero 9 Black (using the GoPro suction cup mount)