Indonesia
Indonesia, May 2017 ~ Ned and Yan were reluctant blenny hunters for sure. Janet Eyre and I informed them that we were changing the afternoon dive plan. We wanted to skip the reef and have the boat drop us near the shore, at the base of an old lava flow, instead. Janet was surveying fish for REEF and I was hunting for blennies. We were on a roll, having added the Sulu Blenny (Meiacanthus abditus) to our life lists just … 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
April 2013, Halmahera, Indonesia ~ More soft coral mimics! Back in November, I posted a video of a nudibranch, Phyllodesmium rudmani, that mimics the soft coral, Xenia, upon which it feeds (click here to see the previous post). Ned wasn’t with me on that dive so last month, during our cruise through Halmahera aboard the Dewi Nusantara, our guide Yann made sure Ned saw this different species of nudibranch, which I think is Phyllodesmium jakobsenae, another predator of soft coral. … Read more
I love the way Harlequin Shrimp move – their little abdomens waggle – like bobbleheads in reverse – bobblebutts! And the “wax on – wax off” movement with their claws – too cute! However, once you get past their looks, it gets a little gruesome because Harlequin Shrimp are voracious predators of starfish. I say gruesome because they don’t put a quick kill on them. No, they flip the starfish over so it can’t walk away then proceed to consume … Read more
October 2012 ~ Here are a few more observations from our most recent trip to Raja Ampat, Indonesia. Batanta, one of four main islands, is located just a few cruising hours from the port of Sorong and is usually the first and last stops on our itineraries. That has never been enough for me so for this most recent trip aboard the Dewi Nusantara, we planned an all-Batanta itinerary. The heavily forested island has been my favorite for beachcombing, birdwatching and … Read more
November 2012 ~ Blennywatcher is still on the road and delighted to report that we’ve managed to add quite a few species to our life lists during this cruise around Batanta, Indonesia, including this nudibranch, Rudman’s Phyllodesmium (Phyllodesmium rudmani). Nudibranchs are sea slugs, shell-less marine snails; a group that includes some of the most colorful and beautiful invertebrates on the reef. This is one that we’ve long wanted to see. Our guide, Yan Alfian seemed pretty confident that we’d see … Read more
October, 2012 ~ Aboard the Dewi Nusantara, Blennywatcher is circumnavigating the island of Batanta, one of the four main islands of the Indonesian region known as Raja Ampat. This is the eighth year that we have dived in this area but the first with an itinerary that would keep us almost entirely around one island. Because of its proximity to Sorong, the starting and/or ending point for most liveaboard dive boats, Batanta is almost always on every itinerary but I … Read more
Today on Blennywatcher, I’m sharing images of two things that are not related, but caused us some confusion a few years ago. In Beangabang Bay, Indonesia, Ned and I encountered what we were certain was a very large squid egg case. It turned out not to be so, but at that moment we were certain that was what we had. It was long and tubular, similar in color and shape to the Diamond Squid egg case we’d seen in photos. We … Read more
From the Archives: Anyone who has attended one of Ned’s talks about Indonesia has heard the tale of Alfred Russel Wallace, who is today considered one of the most renowned field biologists of all time and the father of biogeography. In 1858, after weathering a bout of malaria while on Ternate, he wrote, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.” Wallace’s story and the chain of events set into place by his paper are chronicled … Read more
Indonesia (2004) – We spent the better part of 4 days in a shallow grass bed watching a shoal of squid mating and laying eggs down in the grass. We could not predict when they would show up and even more frustrating, they would spook and disappear for anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes. This made for a lot of time underwater, just waiting. During the long waits, I amused myself by watching an anemonefish bury itself into its host anemone … Read more