Local Getaways for less
Local Getaways for less… Book now and get that needed rest you deserve. Come join us here in Sodwana Bay and find your soul!
Local Getaways for less… Book now and get that needed rest you deserve. Come join us here in Sodwana Bay and find your soul!
We found a Patrick- Sponge Bob’s best friend! Wow our very first star fish/ Sea star ever found! We found this gorgeous African Red Knob Sea star in Sodwana Bay’s Rock pools while snorkeling! We were on our way to go snorkel in a nearby tidal pool when Tom suddenly saw a bright red star with a grey body clinging to one of the rocks in a shallow pool. At first I thought it might be a toy until it started moving slowly, Tom wanted to touch it, but I cautioned him not to touch it just in case it might be poisonous (Not venomous!)? He then decided to try pick it up with the GoPro and took it out the water to take better pics. It was really huge. Never expected a star fish could get that big – we estimate this starfish was about 20 – 25cm diameter. They can grow up to 30cm in diameter. These Starfish are apparently a prize to keep in an aquarium and are actually nocturnal… Hmmm wonder what this one was doing up so late in broad daylight? Like all sea creatures I would prefer admiring these gorgeous creatures in the sea and having the joy and excitement of been able to find such a creature in the sea rather than captivity seeing them miserable in someone’s house! I always get super excited finding new sea creatures I never imagined could exist and can’t help myself finding out all the amazing fun facts about our new found species… So here are a few fun facts about these beautiful creatures! Fun facts: These starfish like the warm ocean as they are only found in the indo-pacific ocean! The African Red Knob Sea star is also commonly known as the red knob sea star, red spine star or the African sea star (Scientific name – Protoreaster linckii). Now anybody who has held a starfish dead or alive or just seen a starfish would consider this creature to be more like part of some sortof coral, but in actual fact is classified as an animal not plant! These starfish can grow up to 30 cm in diameter. That as long as a standard ruler which in my opinion is rather large for something I always imagined being small! Its body is grey and the red lines and knobs are actually tubercles making its appearance look like it has a really messy circuit board on its back! These stars can be found in shallow tidal pools and love to hang out with coral up to 100m deep – one of their main food sources lives on coral! These poor starfish are great pets for aquariums, but are very incompatible with most reef tanks as they eat soft corals, sponges, tube worms, clams, other starfish, and the like! So why not just leave it in the sea where it can be controlled by nature! Like most starfish they have 5 arms, their bellies are red and they have pink podia’s(feet) with a central mouth like all starfish do! I never knew a creature could do this – The red knobbed starfish has no teeth to consume its prey, instead it will push out its stomach from the inside out and consume its prey afterwards it will retract its stomach back into its mouth and carry on digesting its food! I mean is this thing something from an alien horror movie or something. That sounds really gross and out of this world!!! “Once the starfish has a clam in its arms, it pries the mollusks shell open and release its stomach into the shell. The stomach has very strong digestive juices that kills and liquefies the animal inside the shell. Once the mollusk is dead, the stomach sucks up the animal, brings in its stomach, and leaves the empty shell on the ocean floor.” – Quote from: Branson’s Wild World Starfish do not have brains and use filtered sea water as blood. These creatures become more insane the more you read about them References: Wikipedia, Branson’s Wild World, Pets on Mom
Lets get Sodwana Businesses supporting other local businesses. Check out our advertising PLANS Lets be honest – SafariNow, trivago, tripadvisor and all these corporate travel agencies are great and convenient for customers and how you arrange bookings! But honestly unless you have returning clients and people who actually know about Sodwana Bay or have heard of Sodwana and would like to give it a try, you get lost in the system and have to compete with way more popular holiday destinations such as: Cape Town or Durban or even Mozambique and Richards Bay. Honestly this is truly not fair! Our team here at Sodwana Bay Information wants to help change all that. How do we propose to do this, you may ask? Well by putting Sodwana Bay on the map, by not just tryna recruit old clients in to coming back and a hand full of new tourists that happen to stumble upon this gorgeous rural gem, but we want to recruit new clients who have never been here from all over South Africa and Internationally! Not just the Germans and Hollanders, but what about Americans and the British, Asians etc. Bring them to sunny South Africa. Yeah everybody is scared of crime. But its up to us as a community to chase the rif raf away! How we propose to put Sodwana Bay and your local Business on the map is by taking Sodwana to Social Media… Yeah our community has its Sodwana Bay Facebook groups and that is great! But sadly this is not enough! I have been on countless SA groups and international groups, and I am sad to say – there are no mention of Sodwana Bay anywhere. Although I am totally in love with Sodwana Bay I only learnt this place existed after I turned 19 years old. How sad is that and how many countless people die not even knowing this hidden gem exists! Lets make Sodwana as popular as Cape Town, so famous that international tourists will rather wanna experience true Africa instead of just another Big City/Town! We can help with that. Check out our price list below and help make Sodwana and your business Famous again!
For those who follow our blogs you must’ve read the article about the cute small Snowflake eel.. They may be ankle biters, but no real harm will come from them, especially that they are so small and are super shy rather choosing to flea then attack! But what do you do when you encounter their much larger cousins that might be able to bite your ankle right off given the chance… Well our solution was to flee to the nearest, shallowest smallest rock we could find! Ok, let me reverse too the beginning! We were on our way back to shore after experiencing a super awesome neap tide… The water was only 0.3 m high in low tide and was the shallowest we have ever seen in Sodwana! It was already quite an eventful day, we found a puffer fish, a lionfish and a snowflake eel all in one day… That has to be a record of how many exotic creature we found in one day! We were almost back on dry land when Tom stopped us dead in our tracks, luckily he spotted the eel, we were literally heading straight for it and if Tom didn’t see it might even have stepped on… We switched the GoPro on to try film it – wasn’t aware about how it loves the camera spot light. It left it’s sunbathing spot to come show off to the camera, but obviously a wild animal swimming straight to you especially with razor sharp teeth usually means RUN!!!! Like I mentioned before, we chose the smallest, shallowest, nearest rock we could find… I think the people that saw us standing on this tiny rock must’ve thought we were crazy! Our eel was not very happy, if it really wanted to, it could’ve grabbed one of our legs, but instead it swam as close as possible to rock and swam past us… We later watched the video of this encounter, unfortunately nothing worth showing, but we figured out the poor eel was just so excited to have it’s picture taken and was really just tryna pose for the camera… I think this poor Eel was very disappointed in us for running away from it and got mad tryna get one more shot of it’s self in the camera… We have heard of a really friendly moray Eel that loves the attention of cameras, obviously we always thought the eel lived in the open deep water seas, where all the Scuba divers go to swim… But now we know it likes to visit the snorkelers as well… Kinda disappointed now because we could’ve had really awesome footage of a beautiful Honey Comb Moray Eel… The worst part about it all was that while doing some homework about these creatures to my article – I found out all though they might be dangerous, they don’t really care to hunt during the day and will much rather sleep or sunbathe than attack anything… You really have to annoy the poor creature for it to even think about fighting you off in the day time – although night time is an entire different story, you don’t wanna be mistaken for food… Next time I encounter a Honeycomb Moray Eel, I will definitely be cautious, but not so afraid to give it, it’s 15 seconds of fame… A few Fun Facts about these beautiful creatures: These Honeycomb Eels has numerous names due to it’s numerous different spotted patterns… Some have more leopard spots that are quite large almost resembling patches, whilst others like the one we encountered is super spotty like a cheetah. Their main color an vary between light yellow and white, like we have experienced it all depends on how the light hit the Eel and how deep it is! The spots on the Eel can vary from the Eel its self or because of its environment… Such as if the Eel lives in clear water close to reefs, the spots could be much larger as apposed to those who live deeper in the water without much reefs around… The ones we discovered is actually the opposite way round, but maybe that’s just Sodwana… Like most Eels the Honeycomb Eel loves warm water and will even settle for the red sea… These Eels can be found anywhere in the indo-west pacific ocean… They like to stay close to the reefs during the day and are ready to hunt at night! Next time you wanna plan a vacation make sure to book a beach trip to Sodwana – These Eels are real characters… Honeycomb Eels love tight spaces… Like any other Eel Honeycombs love hiding away in tight fitting holes, that’s if they can find a spot that is uninhabited by another creature… If there are no small holes which the Eel can sleep in they will also reside to lying under coral/rock ledges, since they are nocturnal, they are rarely seen active during the day, if seen at all! We were extremely lucky to have found this Honeycomb Eel Sunbathing during the day out in the open! Honeycomb Eels are super efficient for their environment, they help keep invasive species at bay, such as the Lion Fish. Most already know that lion fish can be super invasive and destroy entire coral reefs if not kept in check by their natural predators… I am so glad we have Moray eels in our reefs at Sodwana Bay, we have spotted a few Lion Fish in the rock pools already, good thing they will never the opportunity to take over our reefs… There are to other popular names for the Eels: the laced Moray or Leopard moray, makes sense on their color variations… Honestly I always imagined every Eel been really ugly… Since the most popular Eel is the electric Moray Eel and that one is super ugly!!! But meeting a couple Snowflake eels and now the Moray Eel I found that the myth of all eels been ugly is just…
Great news Guys – We have a brand new video for you guys – We’ve reached our 11th video and still going strong… Special thanks to everybody who has joined in our journey and continues to support us every step of the way! This is an epic video of a taste of all the exciting things we did at Sodwana Bay in February… Unfortunately our song is just to short to show you all our super exciting moments… Enjoy this epic short video!!! Send us an email about any exotic or scary encounters you have had under the water or on land and your story might go viral! Please go checkout our Patreon Page Below… We wanna start giving you guys who are committed to us exclusive content and be able to further our channel and provide better content to our Patrons… To do this we need funds and all the support we can get… Also check out our YouTube Channel when you done reading this… Every view is one step closer to our goal, we need 4000 hours of our subscribers views and 1000 Subscribers to be able to start making money and better content for you guys, YouTube is free please watch all our videos till the end… and subscribe – It’s Free – if you haven’t already and don’t forget to share the video when you done.
Biological Description: Most species have long, spirally curved abdomens, which are soft, unlike the hard, calcified abdomens seen in related crustaceans. The vulnerable abdomen is protected from predators by a salvaged empty seashell carried by the hermit crab, into which its whole body can retract. Most frequently, hermit crabs use the shells of sea snails (although the shells of bivalves and scaphopods and even hollow pieces of wood and stone are used by some species). The tip of the hermit crab’s abdomen is adapted to clasp strongly onto the columella of the snail shell. Most hermit crabs are nocturnal. Source: WikiPedia I am sure everybody has heard the expression that some people are hermits… being reclusive. We were super excited to find a “Steve” crab in the rock pools… On Sunday, we were prowling Sodwana Bay beach for more video Footage for our youtube channel, unfortunately the tide was still a little bit high and we really didn’t want to wait till the low tide so we scoured what little rock pools could be seen. It’s not as exciting as being in the water it’s self, but you can find a few cute and different creatures that cling to the rocks and corals instead of swimming with the big fish. Hermit Crabs are definitely the kind to cling to rocks and coral and really hate being disturbed… Just like a Hermit person! I really wish we could have picked up one that wasn’t afraid to come out of it’s shell, but maybe one day one of these scaredy crabs might just allow us to see it’s true beauty! On the Left hand side is an illustration of what the hermit crab looks like without a shell – Source: Mother Nature Network and on the left is a smaller crab taken by our GoPro. Both are hermit crabs, although they might be different kinds of Hermits they look similar to each 0ther, I am no expert in this matter… A few fun Facts about the “Steve” Crab: Anyone who has ever heard of a hermit crab most probably know this already… Unlike most crabs who have their own shells that shed and grow with them – the Hermit crab is designed to constantly scavenge for old shells as it gets older… Now we know who keeps on stealing the really cool and intact shells… This is something I really didn’t think existed – You get land hermit crabs and you get marine crabs… I know crabs stay close to water, but I always thought they were more like seals stay close to water to keep their skin moist and of course their main source of food is in the sea… But this is not the case both terrestrial and marine Hermit Crabs have gills and constantly need to keep their gills wet at all times – the only difference is terrestrial crabs have adapted to prolonged times out of water, whilst marine crabs can only last a few minutes out of water – Some hermit crab species are also kept as pets, but I would do my homework before getting one as a pet…. It’s a tough world for a crab – Hermit crabs have quite a tough life when it comes to choosing a home – Because they are constantly growing they constantly looking for a new house – much like a teenager, always looking for the next best thing – Some Hermit crabs will fight till the death to get that perfect home, whilst others will do the more civil thing and create chains waiting to get the right sized shell… A crab that is desperate for a new shell will often go pick on another crab – they will tap the other crabs shell until it comes out, once the crab is out the shell they will fight until one of them accepts defeat – this is kinda sad, they can loose limbs or even die from these encounters… At the end of the battle – the victorious crab gets to take over or keep the shell that was fought over… Now that I think about it – it’s kinda like having two neighbors who hate each other and finally battle it out for the prettiest girl on the block… The chain effect – Now this is a pleasant way to get what you want without the violence… One crab walks up to a shiny pretty shell he/she really wants, from a distance it looks to be the perfect size, unfortunately when it gets there – the shell is to big for it and will not do for it’s size… So it sits and waits… Hermit crabs will sit and guard that shell for up to eight hours if it has to – Mr Hermit decides he has nothing better to do so he sits close to the shell watching it… The next crab comes along seeing the same shell, but the shell is to big for this crab as well so it goes to wait in line holding Mr Crabs claw, this chain will stay unbroken for 8 hours, up to 20 crabs can for a single chain – eventually the crab they have all been waiting for – She is just the right size for the shell, without hesitation Mrs crab takes off her old shell and tries on the new shiny one – first inline is Mr crab – He takes off his old shell and puts Mrs crabs shell on and so the whole chain starts to exchange their shells each moving u to a bigger shell… This just proves that if Hermit crabs are not desperate for shells, they can work together in harmony to achieve all their goals together… Since most snails have a spiral shell (Hermits preferred shells)… Hermit crabs have adapted their soft bodies to be able to Spiral into the shell, clutching their tails around the inside of the shell… Although Hermit Crabs are very confident at fighting each other they are more like the hyenas and vultures of the sea… They scavenge the…