Each month we feature a selection of your letters
ChatSend your letters to simon @ scubamagazine. co. uk
Beautiful MUGs
HERE ARE SOME PHOTOGRAPHIC highlights from a training event run in Mauritius last year. Myself and Marg Baldwin travelled out at the end of November at the request of MUG to do a series of instructor courses. MUG is of course the BSAC club on the island of Mauritius, formed in 1964 and consequently the oldest diving organisation on the island. It was MUG who discovered most of the island’ s best-loved dive sites. These include the wreck of HMS Sirius, the British naval ship sunk during the Battle of Vieux Grand Port.
While we were out there we ran an Advanced Instructor Course and Exam, an IFC, OWIC, PIE,
TIE, Theory paper, Diver Cox’ n and Diver Cox’ n Assessor. On our first night we were invited to MUG’ s 60th anniversary party. This was well attended by divers old and young.
MUG is affiliated with BSAC as number 322; it is also one of the founder members of the Mauritian Federation( MSDA) and the Mauritius Marine Conservation Society( MMCS).
For more information on MUG go to mauritiusunderwater. group ANDY JARVIS BSAC NI 258
Meet the jaguar shark
AS A FAN OF WES ANDERSON FILMS and scuba diving, I watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou( 2004) on at least an annual basis. A playful satire on Jacques Cousteau’ s later films, the film is a knowing study of male vanity and a tribute to a bygone era of underwater exploration.
Much of the plot hinges around a vengeful quest for a fictitious fish, the Jaguar Shark, which was supposedly responsible for killing the protagonist’ s chief diver in an earlier expedition. All the marine creatures in this film were brought to life with charming animations by Henry Selick. I am especially fond of the creature design of the jaguar shark itself, an amalgam of various real-world elasmobranchs. I think I can see basking sharks, great whites and whale sharks in its hybrid form.
Carrying out a whimsical web search, I was delighted to find it now has a real life counterpart, the jaguar cat shark, Bythaelurus giddingsi, first described in 2012 by John McCoster, Douglas Long and Carole C Baldwin. The shark was found during a deep water survey of the Galapagos Islands. The scientists named it after Al Giddings, the veteran cinematographer who helped them film it, but for a common name they decided its colour and markings bore a strong resemblance to Wes Anderson’ s filmic shark. So the world has a real jaguar shark... who knew? DOUGLAS DAY, Rickmansworth
24