Today we went up to Wongat Island to do The Green Dragon B-25 Mitchell bomber and The Henry Leith. The bomber went fine. I got some nice shots which I’ll be showing soon. However, when we went to do The Henry Leith, I brilliantly decided to anchor the boat at the beach so that the ladies could snorkel while Hendrick and I did the wreck. Than meant that I we had to dive off of the beach and I had to remember where the wreck was. I’ve done it many times before, but years ago.

Of course, I couldn’t find it. It’s only twenty metres down, but the water was too dirty so see more than about ten. The bottom where the wreck lies is at twenty metres, so we followed that contour in the area where I thought it was. After fifteen minutes, we gave up and came up to the shallow reef to shoot some pictures. This was my second dive on a big 80 tank. I ended up with 110 minutes. I was using my gills most of the time.

This is a cute little starfish missing only one leg. That’s pretty good by small starfish standards. This one is about five or six centimetres across. I’d say that about half of the starfish that I see are missing at least one leg:I think that it’s a Linckia multifora, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t look quite right.

However, what happens to the leg, if the fish which bit it off doesn’t like the taste? Well, we simply grow a whole new starfish from the leg. Some people call them arms, I call them legs, since we don’t walk on our arms, do we? Here on this severed Linckia multifora leg, you can see four tiny new legs growing out of the severed end:This is a pretty cute trick. Many organisms can do this. Medical researchers are busting their guts trying to find a way to mimic this behaviour in humans. The reason is obvious. Whoever solves the problem first will become the richest person on the planet.

Here is an absolutely lovely young Electric Swallowtail nudibranch (Chelidonura electra): Older specimens develop a lemon yellow edge around the edges.

This particularly nice Divericate Tree Coral (Dendronephthya roxasia) caught my eye:It’t quite lovely and I certainly appreciated the pleasure of seeing it.

However, this is my choice of the day for the shot which pleases me most:The little Glass Shrimp (Periclimenes holthuisi) is about as big as your thumbnail. He has several buddies swimming around him.

They are a nightmare to photograph. They are very small and don’t like the camera up close. They never stop moving, hoping around from place to place and waving their little pincers. Flash photography is useless; you have to use available light. Finally, they are nearly invisible in the first place! You can not see their bodies, only the spots.

It’s like playing “connect the dots”.

Not much is happening here in Madang. That’s just as well, since the mood here this year is distinctly sour. Town is crowded with people moving from place to place and the tension in the air is electric. There is a liquor ban in place until at least after New Year, some say until March. It won’t do a lot of good, since there is plenty of bootleg beer and weed available. Like the Chinese say, the next month or so will be “interesting times”.

Anyway, to prepare your palate for the holidays, I’ll show you some items that I am nearly certain will not be showing up on your menu.

This is a familiar character on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi,  Mr. Lizardfish. Its given name is Reef – that’s Reef Lizardfish. Does that sound like a good name for a Hollywood actor? It’s a stage name, anyway. Who would buy tickets to see someone named Synodus variegatus  in a movie?

Never mind. I took an extra silly pill this morning.

This adorable little thing has the equally adorable common name of the Papuan Toby (Canthigaster papua):It’s a flash-lit shot that I got at the B-25 bomber The Green Dragon.  The colours are slightly oversaturated by the flash, but it’s so pretty that I’m not going to complain. Sometimes I prefer to forget my fussiness about getting things accurate and go for the gorgeous. This little sweetie persuaded me to let it shine.

Here is a tasty little Nudibranch. It’s a shame that they don’t make candy that looks this pretty. It’s a Phyllidia coelestis:

Nudibranchs are becoming strangely scarce around Madang. I am very suspicious about the pollution level in Astrolabe Bay.  First the sharks disappear and now the Nudibranchs. What’s going on?

This little beauty is a Latticed Sandperch (Parapercis clathrata):

I shot it on the top of the reef at Magic Passage  last Saturday. The light was very good. In this shot I deliberately oversaturaded the colours of the fish. It’s a trick that I use to remind myself of the colours that I saw. Fortunately I have an excellent visual memory. Unfortunately, I can barely remember my name, or anybody else’s. I can remember a face for a decade. Five minutes after coming aboard Faded Glory  and introducing themselves, I have to ask new divers to remind me of their names.

I had the brilliant idea of showing you a different coloured Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus)  every day until Christmas:

I don’t know how that is going to play out. I’m running out good images in my accumulation. I’ll have to get a lot of shots on Saturday.

Finally, the least likely to show up on your plate are these miniscule, but undoubtedly yummy shrimp:
These are tiny, nearly transparent commensal shrimp that live in a fungiform coral (Heliofungia actiniformis).  The species here is the problem – identifying it. It could be Periclimenes holthuisi  or possibly P. venustus,  though there are specific markings on each of those species that are missing or distorted in these specimens.

The interesting thing here is that it is possible  that you are looking at an undescribed species. It happens all the time here. Every year species formerly undescribed are discovered near Madang. This could  be one.

Anybody out there want to check this one out?

Yesterday was our regular Underwater Saturday. There was a big storm on Friday night. The weather was nasty and grey on Saturday morning and stayed that way all day.

We were looking for a sheltered spot to escape the big rollers coming in from Astrolabe Bay.  It’s nearly always calm in Pig Bay,  so we headed there at a crawl.

Here’s a GPS display of where we went (you will need to click on the image to enlarge it):

I’ll explain a few items on the chart for those who are interested. The chart is a screen capture from a Humminbird 987C. The display above was actually taken at the dock in front of my house. I just moved the cursor to the spot that I wanted to display. You can see that the depth under the transom of Faded Glory  was seven feet at the time – about mean-tide. It might go up or down about 1.5 feet from that.

The course and speed are meaningless, since the boat was stationary.

Ignore the time. The unit was purchased in the USA because it’s much cheaper there. The company punishes you for this by limiting the time zones that you can select to those in the USA. As if that’s not enough, you can’t display anything in Metric measurements. We certainly wouldn’t want America getting onto that bit of gold!. This is done primarily so that they can charge Australians and others on the metric system an extra US$2,000 for the unit and protect their “you’re not Americans” distributors. This seems very cheesy; so much for all the hooey about free trade.

The temperature is that of the water in front of my house. It’s about what you’d want for a warm bath. Again, it’s American style. It would be 32.8° C in the normal world. If you’ve never bathed in tropical waters, you owe it to yourself to do it while you can still enjoy it.

You can also see the distance from my house in statute miles. You could walk there in less than an hour if you were Jesus. It also shows the bearing from my house – the direction that Jesus would walk if he were using a compass.

The bulls-eye thing is the spot where we dived. The straight line extending from it to the southwest is the direction to my house.

You’ll note that we use a local name for the island. We call it Pig Island  – it’s Tab Island  on the Admiralty Charts.  You can also see the location of a shipwreck – the Copal.

Land is yellow. Shallow water is blue.

You can now read a GPS screen as well as anyone.

So . . . what did we see?

Not much. The water was disgusting. I did manage this shot of an old Cesena fuselage that was dumped here. It sat in a shipping yard for years until the owner forgot about it and the shipping company needed the space. Somebody hired a helicopter to dump it at Pig Island  as a dive attraction. It’s not very attractive:

I remember sitting on Faded Glory  with Jan Fletcher years ago. We heard a helicopter coming and looked around. Suddenly it flew over the top of the coconut trees only a hundred metres or so away and dropped the fuselage in the water with an enormous SMAK  like the world’s most painful belly-flop. All we could do was stare at each other in puzzlement. Then we started laughing our heads off. Serendipity strikes again.

I did manage to get a couple of shots of these weird transparent shrimp (Periclimenes holthuisi).  In this shot, you can see a female carrying eggs. The egg mass is the creamy-white blob in the middle of the body. If you click to enlarge, you can see the individual spherical eggs:

Here’s a shot of another individual – maybe a male:

To give you an idea of the size, the length would be about the width of your thumb.

It’s a nagging worry to me that things that look as if they were made by the glass-blower at a carnival should not be living. How does that work?

Somebody is bound to ask. There are no pigs on Pig Island.