Fish Watching
For this week’s Photo Friday: Portrait challenge: It took almost two hours to get this portrait of the tiny Redhead Coralgobies. Learning the nature of a fish is often key to getting a decent image. Coral gobies live deep within branching corals and often take the same path through those branches. Having the luxury of time to spend watching, waiting and positioning usually pays off (but not always).
We are still diving in Indonesia, but now back in Internet range with time to post a few observations. One of my recent favorites is the many different looks of the Masked Grouper, Gracila albomarginata. On a dive in the Banda Sea, I noticed a small fish that I didn’t recognize. It was bright purple with lovely red margins on its anal and tailfins. Another I saw had a light, squarish spot on its side, reminiscent of the purple Square … Read more
We’re off the grid for a few weeks, diving in the land of coral gobies – aren’t they cute? We’ll try to post as soon as our boat comes in for provisioning, if we can find an Internet cafe. So don’t forget about us – check back soon for more fish fun.
This is the last in our series of posts from our recent trip to Dominica. Alternate habitats like sand flats and sea grass beds can be “hit or miss” – we might find all kinds of interesting things or we might wander around for an hour and get skunked. Either way, it is the thrill of the hunt that makes it fun. The grass bed at the site called Champagne was a winner so we ended up diving there 3 … Read more
Dominica 2014 ~ Two of our recent posts have been about our visit to Dominica in the eastern Caribbean. There were too many photos for one post, so this is Dominica Fishes – Part 2. The lizardfish below is a Sand Diver, Synodus intermedius. Just after entering the water at one of our favorite Dominica reefs, Danglebens Pinnacles, I saw Ned make a dash for the sand down at 80 feet. He had seen the Sand Diver sitting very still, … Read more
Dominica! When Ned and I were asked to lead a 2014 REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation) field survey, we suggested the lush tropical island in the eastern Caribbean. Our 2011 visit with friends, including the Wilk family (of ReefNet fame) and Dr. Ben Victor, had been so productive that we were eager to return. The eastern Caribbean has some interesting diving and the region has plenty of unusual fishes to lure avid fishwatchers looking to add a few more species … Read more
Here’s another strange one: A nudibranch that attaches to and eats the fins of shrimp gobies! Shrimp gobies are cool fishes – teaming up with nearsighted burrow-building shrimp, the vigilant gobies act as sentinels, watching for danger, while the shrimp build communal burrows. Life is good out on the sand flat, right? Well yes, until the little nudibranch, Gymnodoris nigricolor, enters the scene. In the photo, the nudibranch is the little black job hanging onto the fin of the goby. … Read more
In 1999, on our first trip to Lembeh Strait, Indonesia, we were introduced to dives unlike any we’d ever experienced. No colorful coral reefs here – this was “muck diving” – a new concept to us. Dropping down into greenish water to behold a wide-open expanse of nothing but black sand was almost enough to send many of us scurrying back to the boat. But it had taken us 44 hours and 5 flights to get here, so we stuck … Read more
Here are a few more favorite Blennywatcher images from 2013. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will already have seen most of our favorite images, but some didn’t make into a post and others were published earlier this year in Alert Diver, Scuba Diving or Wetpixel. So, we’re ringing in the New Year with a few more photos from 2013, starting with this Anchor Tuskfish displaying quite a mouthful of teeth. The menacing look is quite … Read more
Underwater, I am usually on the hunt; moving quickly and looking for unusual animals. But dense schools of fishes will stop me every time – I give pause to contemplate the mesmerizing movement.