Dive Info

Marine Life

In this section of the CIB website, you’ll find the basics of marine biology you need to enjoy your dives in a whole new way. What follows isn’t just a simple guide to the species you might spot on your dives; we want to share knowledge about the marine environment to help you better understand the world we enter every time we go underwater.

Biologists often use terms like communities, ecosystems, or biocenoses to study nature (not just the underwater kind). These words often define complex concepts that describe a slice of the natural world. In fact, they’re necessary to help us better understand how the living part of our planet works.

But we won’t be using any of that here. We’ll try to describe the different parts of the marine environment that we divers visit on our outings—meaning we’ll look at the ecological characteristics and the flora and fauna of each type of dive.

It’s worth noting that these descriptions might not be completely strict (at least from a scientific standpoint), but they’ll be a close match to what you’ll actually see out there. Each type of dive corresponds to a habitat that might have different topographical features, creating a landscape similar to other types of dives. For example, you’ll find certain species on a shallow dive, but if there’s a wall with low light, you might find species there that are more typical of deeper dives.