Before last year, I had never heard of  Whale Sharks. They are the biggest fish on earth.  A true shark, it is nonetheless a harmless plankton-eating machine. They migrate through the Mexican Rivera during August- September as they head down to their breeding grounds in Belize. In the area near Cancun you can swim with them. The  poster for the Whale Shark encounter taunted “Do You Dare?”  Well, of course we did.

We started out with a caravan of small boats each holding six to ten passengers and a captain. There was a perfect blue sky, popcorn clouds and transparent water in shades of turquoise, aqua, seagreen and royal blue which fed my color-loving soul.

The boat sped twenty five miles out into the open water bouncing crazily over the formidable swells, sunlight tossing rainbows into the spray the boat kicked up. On the way pods of Dolphins often swam along side the boats leaping and playing as if this were just the most fun for them. They are wonderful to watch. The ocean herself is a living thing, I believe, and in her belly a second world of living creatures.

Our guide schooled us on what to expect when we at last got to these magnificent giants of the sea.  These behemouth fish are actually gentle. They swim with their huge mouths open scooping  up the plankton and small fish and expelling the water through their gills. We were soon to learn the difference between being a large fish in a small pond and being a small fish in a big pond. We were definately the small fish.

Our guide said we should become like the fish in the sea, just another animal at one with the ocean. He advised us to swim along side the shark rather than toward him. They tend to swim on the surface of the water so they are easy to spot. Their huge caudal fin and two dorsal fins stick high out of the water making them easy to spot from a distance.  Though we had been told that some might be a big as a school bus, we were still not prepared for how truly gigantic these creatures were. Our first sight of them was a thrill. I found them to be quite beautiful with lines of yellow and white spots running the lengh of their bodies. The spots between their pectoral fins are like a fingerprint, no two are the same. The image below is a stock photo because we did not have an underwater camera with us.

When we finally had the chance to get in the water with them we had to really work to keep up with them. They are very fast. The sea was thick with  plankton they feed on. We swam quite close beside one that was about  twentyfive feet long. I could see his eye and it seemed that he was looking back at me with curiosity, turning his head slightly toward me  before swimming away. Two tiny remora were attatched to his gills catching the leftovers.

Afterwards as we climbed back onto the boat happy and exhausted,  our Captain was stirring up a delicious Cerviche for us.  Boy, did that taste good.  The long ride back to shore was full of animated conversation about what we had experienced.

And what a truly amazing adventure it was. Awesome!

We were in Las Vegas a couple of days ago and visited Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden at the Mirage. It is a state of the art facility working to educate the public on the value of preserving the wild animals of our world and the places where they live.

Beautiful white tigers, white lions and other exotic cats make themselves at home in this tropical paradise. The animals are there as ambassadors for their species and their ecosystems. It is from them that we can learn and understand the importance of man’s great impact on this planet.

I was most enchanted by by a litter of one-year-old tiger cubs. There are five of them, one orange male and his four sisters, all white with various shades of stripes from black to pale gray. You can identify an individual tiger by his stripes, as no two have the same pattern.

You can see how different the two sisters above look. I thought this was interesting,  the stripes go all the way to their skin. If you were to shave a tiger ( don’t try this ) the stripes would still be visible. These cubs have been hand raised and are comfortable with their human keepers who go into the large tiger habitat to play with them several times a day. We were fortunate to be there for playtime.

The tigers are quite big at one year but ultimately will reach somewhere between 200 and 500 pounds. Right now they still play like kittens and their faces have a young look.  The keepers which included one young woman,  (photo at right) brought in several large cardboard boxes which the tigers immediately began to playfully toss around and rip to pieces. They were so much fun to watch. You can see how large they are compared to the young lady and also how affecionate they are with her.

Tigers love swimming and playing in the large pool which is beautifully landscaped into their tropical garden modeled after their natural habitat.

When we were having the shrubbery around the house trimmed the other day the yardman called our attention to a swarm of bees that had found a way into the eves of our house. He told us they were inside the wall and that we needed an exterminator or we could be facing some extensive damage.  We called one place that said they would have to destroy the hive and the bees.

We try not to  kill anything. If we find a bug in the house my husband captures it and releases it outside. So he found another company who could remove the bees and the hive without killing the bees.

Wow, what they found was a huge honeycomb just inside the brick outerwall of our house. Thousands of bees! They believed, judging by the size of it, that it had been there  for several years. Mike’s infrared camera showed that it was roughly triangular shaped, about three and a half feet wide at the top and four feet long. This  colorful scan is really pretty, I think and it told the men exactly where to cut out the wall board.

The men donned protective gear, took out a huge piece of the wall and vaccumed up the bees, queen and all. Then they peeled the honeycomb off put it in a bucket and took the whole shebang to to a beekeeper who would reunite the bees with their hive. Almost all of the bees were saved. Those that weren’t vaccumned into the safe bag were very docile and confused, essentially lost without their home.  Later we saw some of them trying to get into the closed up hole under the eves. By this morning they were all gone.

We are fortunate  that we could find people who knew how to save as many as possible. Though we are glad to have them out of our home, we can feel good that most of them did not have to be harmed in the process.  You can find critter rescue groups in your area of the country for most all kinds of animals on the internet. If they are theatening your space, they still deserve a chance to be safely and humanely relocated.

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