Lapus Lapus Island, an easy dive for beginners, has variegated soft corals, spiny lionfish and rainbow-coloured nudibranches (molluscs).
"Critics have said that these visible spiny structures could be shredded connective tissue, " Professor Benton explained.
Could they be paid to clear out pirate dens and save the spiny lobster?
Six limbs, each outfitted with spiny, comblike hair, collect pollen and relay it to saddlebags, called corbiculae.
The plant was small, with spiny, silvery leaves, woody stems and blue flowers.
Although previous records had suggested the presence of native oyster beds, horse mussel beds and the European spiny lobster, none were found.
Favorites from a recent dinner: sticky Guanabana glazed ribs with green papaya slaw, conch chowder, slow braised oxtail and spiny lobster in a dry sherry bisque with green garlic zucchini.
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Between them they keep alive a tradition that goes back centuries, a tradition celebrated on the plate in the form of stuffed mussels, marinated anchovies, octopus salad, deep-fried sea anemones, prawns with cannellini beans, and linguine with spiny lobster.
The bottom is mainly brilliant white sand or greenish grass, but we were searching for the vaguely brown and yellow hues that indicate the rocks and coral where Caribbean spiny lobster (commonly referred to as "bugs" for their insect-like appearance) live.
As our Land Cruiser sped off down toward the nine-tent Olakira Camp, the sheer scale of the landscape unfolded, the spiny flat-tops of the acacia trees dotting undulating fields of grass and gentle hills rolling out to wide open vistas of scruffy brush.
The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
Growing up in South Florida, it had become an annual ritual to travel by small boat across nearly 100 miles of open ocean to be in the Abacos at the beginning of August, when the Bahamas opens a "sport season" during which visitors are allowed to hunt the spiny lobster that live in and under the coral reefs and outcroppings in its shallow waters.
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