With my dive count now over two thousand, it’s amazing to me that all but possibly a hundred have been within a ten minute boat ride from our dock. This must surely make me one of the luckiest divers on the planet.
Since I’m feeling so lucky today, let me show you some of the lucky shots that I got this morning with Tris, Tracey and Pascal.

I’ve seen this fish around many times, but have only today been able to get a photo of one. I can identify most local fishes generically, if not specifically, but I haven’t bothered to look this one up yet. I usually don’t bother to learn a lot about a certain species until I have a photo of it that I can label with it’s taxonomic name. I usually go by common names, as do most divers:

For now, I will call it “The Mystery Fish.”

This toothy little horror is Clark’s Anemonefish. The teeth are real and they do hurt when they bite. What’s more, they like to bite:

Here’s another anemonefish that is not so feisty. This is the Pink Anemonefish. The interesting feature of this show is the oral disk of the anemone at the centre of all the tentacles. This is, of course, where the anemone puts its food for digestion. I fed an anemone half a banana once. (Yes, divers get bored.) It seems that they will eat just about anything. It took about fifteen minutes for it to ‘swallow’ the banana. I didn’t wait around to see if it coughed it back up:

The other interesting thing about oral disk is that it is where many of the anemonefish sleep.

Here’s some beautiful yellow anthea of some kind frolicking around in the coral:

Everybody recognises this mean looking fellow. It is, of course, the giant moray eel:

This particular fellow was being very uncooperative. Every time I tried to get close enough for a shot, he’d pull his head back into his hidey hole. They are usually not so shy. In fact, the situation is usually the exact opposite – staying far enough away so as not to scare yourself into soiling your wetsuit.

We’ll end up with two cute and harmless cousins – members of the hawkfish family.

This is the Arc-Eyed Hawkfish. Explaining the name would be superfluous:

And, this grumpy but passive little guy is the Freckled Hawkfish:

Again, the origin of the common name is obvious.

I’ve sometimes been asked why I capitalize all of the fish names. There’s some controversy over capitalization of fish names. I won’t get into that boring academic fussiness. I will just say that it’s common courtesy to capitalize proper names.

I ask myself if I was a fish, how would I introduce myself – how would it be written as a conversational snippet?

Maybe something like this:

I’d walk up to a table in a fashionable restaurant where seated is a ravishing woman. I’d take her hand, bow slightly, and say, “Hawkfish, Freckled Hawkfish.”

Related posts:

1. Hawkfishes – Little Jewels of the Sea It’s Saturday morning, so I’m off for a dive. I don’t have much time for composition, so I’ll just show you some pictures. (with apologies to those who have seen them a hundred times already) I like the Hawkfishes. Unlike some other families, there’s not an ugly one in the bunch. (Click...
2. More Fun at Magic Passage Today we went to Magic Passage for our Saturday morning dive. There was a fairly strong incoming current and the water was very warm. Here is Tracey, Albert, and Anna heading out to the mouth of the passage: At about twenty metres, Albert was frantically pointing under a ledge. I...
3. First Underwater Images from the Canon G-10 Reviewing the performance of the Canon G10 camera in its WP-DC28 factory housing on a dive at the Eel Garden near Madang, Papua New Guinea....
4. Another Perfect Saturday – The Canon G10 Comes Through A perfect party at the perfect place and a camera that can't take a bad picture. What more can a guy ask for? More fun on Faded Glory...
5. Night Ships Last night the ship lights across the harbour were sparkling like stars. I cranked the Canon G11 up to ISO 800 and got hand-held telephoto shots. Amazing!...
6. As I See the Sea After yesterday’s marathon post concerning the dumbing-down of science I seem to be at a temporary loss for words. Those who tire of my bombast but enjoy the pretty pictures will sigh in relief. I’m also running three days behind, so I’m using my Time Machine to fake it, as...
7. Barracuda Point – Dirty Water – Disappointing Results Murky, turbid water floating full of glop does not make good conditions for photography. Not every day is perfect. Even in Paradise....

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 07:20 and is filed under Under the Sea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.