Underwater Naturalist

Stop seeing fish. Start seeing what they're doing.

Most divers spend their first fifty dives looking at things. A turtle, a nudibranch, something large moving in the blue. It's a perfectly good way to dive, but it's the surface of the thing. Every reef you've ever been on is a working system, and once you can read it, a familiar dive site stops being scenery and starts being a story.

The PADI Underwater Naturalist course teaches you to read it. You'll cover aquatic plant and animal habitats, the symbiotic relationships that hold a reef together, and the difference between what an animal is actually doing and what divers commonly assume it's doing. A surprising amount of received wisdom about marine life turns out to be wrong.

It's also the course that quietly makes you better around animals, because understanding behaviour is what stops you blundering into it. Two dives with an instructor, and all scuba equipment is included for the duration of the course.

What Underwater Naturalist Gives You

You'll come away able to identify the major aquatic life groupings you'll meet in South African waters, understand how they interact, and interpret behaviour rather than guess at it. It's the difference between reporting that you saw a cleaner wrasse and understanding why it was allowed to live.

It counts as one of the five specialities toward your Master Scuba Diver rating, and it pairs naturally with Fish Identification and the AWARE conservation courses if the ecology side of diving is what pulls at you.

Ready to see more on every dive? Book Underwater Naturalist below, or get in touch with our team if you'd like to talk through which specialities suit your diving.