Hello

Hello,
I’m Triton (Benno Salzgeber). I am a physicist and highschool teacher. Since my student days, my interests have included biology, especially marine biology, and underwater photography. As a snorkeler and freediver, I am mainly active in the Mediterranean, but also in other seas. I am fascinated by how you can observe, photograph and film creatures from a wide variety of animal phyla as well as seagrass and algae species in the top few meters of the water. It is also so bright there that these organisms can be seen in their natural colors and can be recorded. You can also do this in SCUBA equipment, where most SCUBA divers dive to greater depths, where you need artificial light and flash lighting to see and photograph enough, which is not of much interest to me.

Freediving means that you have to take a single deep breath before you resurface. In German, there is also the unwieldy term apnea diving for this. If you don’t already practice it yourself, then I would like to tell you that you can easily and completely relax and hold your breath under water for quite a while without running out of air. In any case, it is not so much the air that you would be missing, but more the carbon dioxide that accumulates in the blood and triggers the desire for a fresh breath in you. If you train this according to instructions, you can easily stay underwater for one to three minutes, and that’s a lot of time to explore the world down there. According to the recommendation of professionals and doctors, you should not stay down any longer.

A former colleague of mine once aptly described what I do and what fascinates me as my “passion for the sea and the diverse creatures that live in it”.

Just like ordinary snorkelers, and maybe you too, I typically look for and discover fish and other creatures from the surface of the water. I receive great support from my wife and especially from my older son, with whom I am usually on tour, and who have discovered a lot of animals and are both better at them than I am.

If an interesting creature is discovered, I often dive from the surface, even to the seabed, to follow it and photograph or film it if possible. To do this, I use a weight belt and a weighted vest to balance the buoyancy, and to float, or even lie on the ground.

With the following pages, I would like to address you if you want to learn more about the creatures under water, and perhaps compare them with your own experiences. You can choose how far that goes. Is it enough for you to see pictures of species that you have already seen yourself or would like to see one day, and perhaps also to learn the names of the species, or are you interested in background information from marine biology, or are you even a like-minded person? For people who are interested in it, I always give the scientific genus and species names for the species, as far as I know them. This also makes it possible to compare with foreign-language websites and other sources. If you’re not interested in that, it shouldn’t be a problem. In the texts, I often report on my own experiences and sprinkle in marine biological information. In terms of technical depth, this is a bit experimental, because I don’t know your background. So it may be that I write about things that you have known for a long time. Nevertheless, it would be nice if the pictures and texts mean something to you. The same applies if some things don’t interest you or are still overwhelming at the moment.

I would be happy to learn more about you on the blog page of my website! I understand German, English and French and a little other languages.

There are thematically oriented pages such as cephalopods and jellyfish, where I bring in my own experiences from the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Atlantic, and those that refer to either the Mediterranean or the Caribbean and the creatures that live there, and I still have some plans, so it would be nice if you would check more often, whether something has happened here again.

The two pictures of me were taken by my older son. Otherwise, the pictures on my website, unless otherwise stated, are either from me or my older son. If you are looking for pictures for your own projects and find what you are looking for here, please feel free to contact me on the blog page. I am usually happy to give away high-resolution versions using a Creative Commons CC-BY license.