Welcome to ::divepix:: The aim pursued by this site is to provide not only a photographic illustration of the animal and vegetal creatures that populate the waters surrounding Ilêts Pigeon (a.k.a Reserve Cousteau) in Guadeloupe (Gwadloup in Creole), but also a user-friendly pedagogical tool for all, beginners and connoisseurs alike.The site is bilingual English and French, but wherever possible species are also being given their local Creole designation. As it turned out Illustrating a decade of regular diving on the west coast and south of Basse-Terre (namely Saintes and Sec-Pâté), these photos turned out to have a survey value with the authors’ diving logbook notes pointing to demographic changes, which more often than not are cyclical.While certain species will sometimes almost disappear for a year and eventually reappear (Spotted moray or Flamingo tongue being good examples) for no obvious reason, certain changes are more dramatic, like the tendency for those huge Barrel sponges to rot away, the long disappearance of the already rare Queen angelfish (which now can only be seen in relative abundance at Sec Pâté) and more adversely the terribly quick invasion of the Lionfish in mid-2011, courtesy of a Miami-based laboratory. On a more pleasant note, where spotting a distant turtle commanded celebrations ten years ago, strict fishing restrictions have borne fruit and virtually no dive can be accomplished nowadays without the company at one time or another of these prehistory-age carapace-bearing reptiles.
