Monday morning dawned peacefully enough. Why does it always start that way? The days which turn out to be the ones during which you should have taken a Valium and gone back to sleep always seem to begin with the birdies twittering and the sun popping up like a big smiley face. Anyway, it was a pretty sunrise and I was there to take its picture. Little did I know that horrible events were brewing. My first warning was when I suddenly began mixing metaphors:

As it turns out, mixed metaphors were not the day’s most terrifying gifts. *

Unfolding events soon proved it fortunate that only the night before I had finished my labours on my soon-to-be-patented MadDog’s Death-Ray Alien Exterminator. Here is a secret picture of it. Please don’t tell anybody about this:

As you can see, it’s a rather Disneyesque design, just the ticket for the teen super-hero set. I made it in my laundry room out in back of the house. It’s mostly old lawn mower parts and bits and pieces of computers and defunct VHS and 8-Track tape players. The charging unit can be carried in a back pack. It provides enough charge to kill approximately all of the aliens in the known universe. If there are any left after exterminating the bulk of them, you can use the ray gun itself as a club. It’s very sturdy.

It was, indeed, fortuitous that I had completed my construction project, as early in the day we were invaded by a troop of four metre long aliens disguised as Mantis Shrimp (Odontodactylus scyallarus):

The one in the image above is busily smashing our sidewalk into tiny little bits. Curiously, these “Barbie Crushers”, as we nicknamed them, seem to be enraged by sidewalks. The one above also ate several large dogs and three mops. When it headed for our remaining supply of mops and our single mop bucket, I decided to take decisive action.

Having previously charged my MadDog’s Death-Ray Alien Exterminator, I donned my Cowstria Super Hero costume and did battle, protecting our mop supply and the mop bucket which was accidentally overturned in the fracas:

For those of you who may not be familiar with Cowstria, its other name is Austria. Here I am, taking careful aim to dispatch one of the horrid aliens.

Having homogenised them all, I decided to cool off with a nice, refreshing dive. Near The Green Dragon  B-25 Mitchell bomber I found this plump Cushion Star (Clucita novaeguineae):

I always think of these as the Mermaids’ footballs. Hey, wait. Mermaids have no feet. Never mind.

Now, you might think that this is a mistake:

And you would be wrong. I seldom make mistakes and when I do I bury them under disingenuous excuses. This is a Divericate Tree Coral (Dendronephthya roxasia)  growing upside-down under the wing of The Green Dragon.

And that is about as much as I can cough up today.

* Of course, it’s not really a ray-gun, nor was there an alien invasion. Sorry to disappoint. The gizmo is the business end of an Internet satellite dish. On Monday, we replaced the one which we’ve been using for about two years with a different one from another vendor. It’s much cheaper and faster. Unfortunately, the K20,000 we spent for the gear is probably now a write-off. Anybody want to buy a ray-gun?

Well, here it is on a Monday evening at 19:30 and I’m dead tired and behind the eight-ball. Monday was what Mondays are. How does so much messiness accumulate over the weekend when everybody’s supposed to be playing or resting or otherwise not creating problems for someone else to solve?

So, I’ve had my beer and my cigar and I’m going to sit here for a while and annoy you. It’s my hobby, being annoying and inserting my absurdist opinions and philosophy cagily into these supposedly informative and amusing accumulations of words that we refer to as posts.  I’m like the guy with the huge model train layout in his basement who, after dinner, forces guests to lumber down the steps to the dank recesses of the underground toy railway where they will be treated to several hours of mind-numbing narrative concerning the building, operating and care of . . .

Excuse me. I drifted off into my alternate universe there for a moment.

Anyway, when we were cruising The Eel Garden  on Saturday, we surprised a few critters by blowing masses of poisonous air at them and flashing blinding lights in their eyes. This critter was neither surprised nor blinded. It’s dead:Sometime recently, possibly the preceding night, this poor little bivalve met its maker. Fortunately it had no brain to wither in fright nor mouth with which to scream. It is, nevertheless, a sad little scene. I vainly tried to find a shell book here at the house to identify it, but I think that I must have hauled them all off to the office. I call it the Alien Writing Shell;  always have and always will.

I was showing Kate the comical floppiness of an Elephant Ear Sponge when this surprised Brittle Star crawled out and said, “What the . . . “We flashed it with the Men In Black memory zapper thingie that is built into my camera and left it to recover. It will be blissfully unaware of the experience.

Monty Armstrong was busily snapping away with his new Canon G11. You can see a nice, big, fat Phyllidia varicosa  nudibranch there at the bottom of the image. We now have three G11 setups in our little gaggle of divers, though Rich Jones has yet to baptise his:

His excuse on Saturday was that he had a cold. Personally I think that his decision to forego diving had something to do with the fact that there were no less than six bikini-clad young ladies on board our two vessels. I’m too old to notice such things, of course.

This male Purple Anthea (Pseudanthias tuka)  was at least as surprised as I was when I flashed him. It was a snap shot that I didn’t expect to come out at all. I had just popped over the top of a bommie and he was desperately thinking about which way to flee: This is the only good shot of the male of this species that I have. It was simply dumb luck to get it.

A Dardanus  species Hermit Crab was likewise surprised and equally annoyed when I knocked his house down much the same as the wolf did to the three little pigs:This one seemed particularly peeved and simply glared at me for a while before reaching down and pulling his abode upright again. Not all crabs are created equal. Some are crabbier than others.

A rarely seen Mantis Shrimp (Odontodactylus scyallarus)  gave me only about two seconds before scurrying under a ledge:I sometimes amuse myself by pondering what these creatures would think of us if they could, in fact, think at all. If they were the philosophical equivalent of humanists, would they count us as miscreants or mentally disturbed? If they had religion would we be Gods who disturbed their peaceful world for our demented amusement?  I can dig it either way.

If I’m lucky, I won’t dream about that tonight.

I’m a little tired of doing the travelogue thing every day and I’m a little homesick for my warm, wet, salty front yard. I’ve been working on some of my underwater images. I noticed that I’ve never done a post on mantis shrimp, surely some of the most alien-like creatures in my yard:

The shot above is a reworked version of one that appeared in A Nasty Customer and Fancy Pants. It’s a Odontodactylus scyallarus if it matters to you.

Here’s another shot from a different angle and different lighting conditions:

I’m pretty sure that all of these images are the same species, but I don’t have my books with me.

It is rare to see a mantis shrimp in the open. They are very shy. I managed this shot when one was so surprised to see me that it froze for a moment before scuttling into its burrow:

Their eyes are mesmerising. They follow you and when you look into them you seem to be looking into a deepness that is difficult to describe. They have the most complex eyes of any animal.

They feed by clubbing or spearing (according to the species) their prey with their raptorial claws. You can see the clubbing behaviour in a very cool clip on YouTube.  I had one of these in an aquarium tank in our house:

I fed it bits of frozen raw chicken. I would drop a chunk in the water and the mantis shrimp would come up to investigate. Then it would club it a couple of times, making sounds like firecrackers, and carry it back to its burrow.

Once when we had visitors, I decided to hand feed my mantis shrimp. It was a big mistake. It clubbed my thumb and split it open. It was so quick that I didn’t realise that I was hurt until I saw the blood streaming from my thumb.

Then came the PAIN!