ISLAND TIME DIVERS: Bearded Fireworm

End of the diving week and you enter that time of purgatory; the preflight surface interval. You cannot dive before your flight and you have every intention of doing one of those interesting things you saw in a brochure, like hiking remote trails, birdwatching, fishing, museums, you know all that tourist stuff. So you grab your snorkel gear, head back to the beach and jump in. Why dry out before you have to?

We enjoy our purgator snorkels, although we would never publicly admit to it, no real diver would you know. Sans SCUBA noise you can observe a lot of critters without disturbing them and really learn their behaviors. On one such snorkel we happened upon a large number of lettuce sea slugs near some rocks. Resting on top of the water we watched as a bearded fireworm followed the trail of a lettuce sea slug. The fireworm was advancing toward it's prey moving its head side to side as if sniffing for the scent of the sea slug. It found the sea slug, moved on top of it and we watched as the lettuce sea slug literally melted into the fireworm. Only a few remnants of green leafy skin ruffles attested that it had every existed. As luck would have it I had left my camera in the room because I did not want to have to unpack it.

This was really the first time that we had paused long enough to watch a very slow moving life and death drama between a bearded fireworm and lettuce sea slug. I knew that the bearded fireworm was a voracious predator that would attack living soft corals but I had never observed one engulfing a sea slug.

Later, on a dive in Cozumel, Mr. Squirrelfish and I found a bearded fireworm eating the tip of a soft coral. The fireworm will eat at the tip of the soft corals and slowly engulf them. Apparently the fireworm was providing great entertainment for Mr. Squirrelfish.

If distrubed the bearded fireworm can flare up it's sharp detachable bristles that can puncture the skin and break off, causing a lot of pain, hence the name fireworm.