Well, I’m actually writing Tuesday’s post on Tuesday. For the last three days, I’ve been play catch-up, since I had to hustle so much for some magazine articles that I am working on. I’m going to have to get Eunie to start cracking the whip two weeks before deadline times so that I don’t get so messed up again. I’m such a slacker. I never used to wait until the last moment for an assignment. I don’t like working under pressure. I don’t know what’s gone wrong in the last year or so. I seem to always be hurrying the last few days before a deadline and I don’t like that. I try not to let it affect the quality of my work, but I think that I’m really kidding myself about that.

Anyway, here’s a strange critter that could spoil your day much more than a missed deadline. In fact, if you were seriously stung by the spines on his dorsal fins, you could be dead,  not just late:

It’s one of the many varieties of Scorpionfish that live in our waters. Here’s another one:

From the front, it is very difficult to see the eyes. Try enlarging the image by clicking it and comparing it to the previous image.You might be surprised where you find the eyes in this image. The “monkey head” figure, is just a fluke of camouflage and the dark depressions where you might think to find the eyes is just a trick of the light and shadows.

The Dwarf Hawkfish, though only half as long as your finger, is so full of colour that it looks as if it were wearing a clown suit:

We have quite a variety of hawkfish here. I should mention that the SEARCH box on the sidebar of Madang – Ples Bilong Mi  works quite well. Just enter “hawkfish” into the box and press <ENTER>.  You’ll see all of the posts in which the word appears.

Here is another shot that you may have seen before. I got this one at Planet Rock, I believe. It is a school of mixed Pickhandle Barracuda and Bigeye Trevally:

They tend to swim around in giant circles, so, if you get inside the circle, you can snap away happily for quite a while without having to chase them.

This is one of my best nudibranch shots. It is also one of our most colourful nudibranchs. The word means “naked lung”. You can see the breathing organs at the right side – the tail end:

Last, but certainly not least, is the Netfin Grouper. This fish seems somehow dignified to me, as if it were the undersea version of a banker or stock broker in a pin-striped suit. Whoops, maybe I did a little faux pas  there. Putting the word dignified in the same sentence with bankers and stock brokers these days might rub some people the wrong way. Oh well, it’s not for me to decide. I put my money under the mattress these days. I lose less that way:

We’ll have to see if tomorrow something else pops into my head beside fish. I certainly hope so and that I have time to write about it.

Related posts:

1. Care for a Little Wine With Your Fish? A little dive on the top of the reef after a bad cold yielded some very nice fish pics....
2. The Aquarium in My Front Yard 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...
3. Heart of the Hunter – Part 1 I'm tied up writing an article for Niugini Blue, so I'm killing two birds with one bullet by giving you a preview of images I'm submitting and some of the text....
4. 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...
5. Make the Scene, Man – at the Reef! We shall, indeed, make the scene at the reef. But first, a Caption Contest....
6. Catching Up With the Fish Today I deliver a puzzle fish, a Napoleon Fish, a stubborn Lizardfish and her cousin, a nudibranch and the bathroom sink of The Coral Queen. Enough, already!...
7. Warm Fish Soup Divers have an amusing expression to describe the scene when there are far too many fish to count. Indeed, you can’t even count the number of species. We call it fish soup. I had some warm fish soup in the tepid water of The Eel Garden  near Pig Island  on...

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 12:22 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.