Sometimes it’s more difficult to think of what to title a post than it is to write it. Yesterday’s The Big Blue Finger is a case in point. Today’s title is even more illustrative. I have a bunch of stuff to show you. It has no theme. What can I call it. I’m getting tired of trying to incorporate the word ‘miscellanea’ into a title. There’s only so many ways to do it. So, Bite Me Red Fish. As you shall see, the red fish doesn’t bite and the bite marks have nothing to do with the red fish.

Okay, okay, I’m obviously rambling now. Let us proceed to an image that I should have deleted, but it’s the only picture that I have of a Solor Boxfish (Ostracion solorensis):It’s a shame it’s such a bad picture. It is very difficult to get close to them. This one was scurrying frantically to get out of sight when I saw it, so I just pointed the camera and snapped, not even knowing if I had focus or even if the fish was in the picture at all. When I got home and opened the image in Photoshop, I could see that I got a lot of smear from the very blurred image caught on the sensor while the shutter was open and one nice, sharp image of the fish when the flash went off, both on the same exposure. This is a problem that I can’t fix on the Canon G10, I think. There’s no way to make the shutter speed faster than 1/60 second when you have the flash turned on. So, you get a partially blurred image with a crisp flash capture over the top of it, so to speak.

Well, I’m sure that that explanation put a lot of people to sleep. How about some poo?You can now state proudly to your friends and neighbors that you know exactly what Sea Cucumber poo looks like. A surprising amount of it comes out of them. I guess it’s not so surprising when you consider that most of what they ingest is plain sand. You have to suck a lot of sand for a bit of nourishment.

I should call this one Death Takes Us All:This beautiful little bivalve has met its doom recently. There hasn’t even been time for much sediment to fill its empty shell. This shell is about 4cm long.

Now for the bite bit. Hard coral is . . . well, uh . . . hard!  You will know for certain the first time you bang your head on it. If you’re a photographer, it will happen sooner or later. However the marks you see here were not made by my pointy, pointy head:No, those marks are the result of normal parrotfish feeding habits. This coral is not as hard as cement, but pretty nearly so. Therefore, you can imagine how hard the teeth of a parrotfish must be. In this case it was a rather large one. The bite marks here are about six or seven cm long. Thank heavens that parrotfish are not inclined to include humans on their menu.

So much for the bite. How about the red fish? Well, in that contest, the Scarlet Soldierfish (Myripristis pralinia)  has little competition:I don’t know what is the origin of the common name, Soldierfish. They all have pretty much the same general form, including the big, big eyes for most of them.

It is interesting to me that, although I usually complain that using flash makes everything look redder than it does in nature, I have to say that it didn’t hurt the representation of this species. The overall shot is warmer that I would prefer, but the fish itself really is that red.

And, it doesn’t appear to be inclined to bite me.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 15:13 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.