I have been feeling very anxious and incompetent for the last month. I was having a difficult time understanding the cause of my feelings. This, of course, simply made matters worse. As I’ve mentioned. I’ve taken on another job aside from my duties in the IT Dungeon. I’m now the editor of two quarterly magazines. It has finally dawned on me what the cause is of my distress. I haven’t had a new job for thirty years. Studies have shown that starting a new job is one of the top stress generators. I had forgotten the feelings of inadequacy, loss of control, uncertainty and raw fear that accompany a new job. I’ve been an author for a long time. However I’ve never been an editor. The job seemed simple when I took it on. It is only now that I’m into it that I realise how little I know about what I’m doing. Wish me well as I struggle to get myself oriented. I’m on a three month probation, so I don’t have much time to prove myself. It’s sink or swim time. Keeping this job and doing well at it so that I have a future in the industry is an essential tactic in our survival strategy as churches will undoubtedly continue to abandon us as we age.

However, today’s sunrise cheered me up:Nice sunrises are getting more and more frequent.

On Saturday we did a dive at The Eel Garden  near Pig Island.  The weather was horrible. We immediately ran into rain and it rained nearly the whole day. Only in the last hour did we get a little sun. Underwater, however, it was beautiful:

A beautiful lady is always a welcome addition to nature’s own. Above is Genevieve and a Magnificent Anemone with Clown Anemonefish or “Nemo” fish.

Here is another one of Genevieve with a Feather Star:

Taking inexperienced divers into my care and teaching them how to enjoy safe diving while learning the mysteries under the ocean is one of the more pleasant parts of my life. Genevieve comes to us with few dives and had not dived for about a year. I expected the jitters and problems on the dive. I was surprised that she was as cool as a cucumber, stayed close to me and interpreted my instructions perfectly. Being an excellent swimmer, she also moves through the water gracefully.

I trapped these Scarlet Soldierfish (Myripistis pralinia)  in a little cave: I had to laugh into my regulator as they darted around crazily as their teeny-weeny brains tried to figure out what to do.

We found the big patch of anemone’s near the island and it was full of  Red and Black Anemonefish (Amphiprion melanopus):I’m sure that this one believed that I couldn’t see him. The will often try to position themselves in the anemone so that only the eye is exposed so that they can keep it on you. I think that they don’t realise the their noses are fully visible.

I’ll finish up with a critter that is probably beginning to bore you.:Yes, it’s the nudibranch, Notodoris minor  again. I’ve found where they are living and I’m to keep on taking pictures of them as long as they are there. It’s a moderately rare species, so I want to “collect” as many as I can. Each image is like a trophy to me.

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 Saturday. Most of the fish that you see here are some species of Anthea:There are many varieties of Anthea.  Most are very colourful. They gather in small schools around a fixed location.

I snapped this shot as I was passing over these two Soldierfish. The one on the left is a Scarlet Soldierfish (Myripistis pralinia)  and the one on the right is a Brick Soldierfish (Myripistis amaena):A you can tell, if you click to enlarge, they were both looking up at me as I passed overhead.

I nearly missed this Slender Grouper (Anyperodon leucogrammicus)  as it tried to sneak past me:One trick that I’ve learned is that fish will almost always flee to deeper water. Therefore one needs to have a head’s up stance to catch the ones which have spotted you and will soon be trying to take the shortest route to a deeper hiding place. This usually means that when they pass directly to your right or left, they will be a close as they are going to get to your camera.

This is a very young Bubble Coral (Plerogyra sinosa)  only about 4cm in diameter. At this stage they look more like a strange, puffy flower:To the right and below is a colony of very small Sea Squirts which look to me to be Eusynstyela latericius.

This sneaky little Blackspotted Puffer (Arothron nigropunctatus)  thought that he was hidden behind a bit of coral about a metre away from me. I popped up and caught him with his mouth open:I’m an old stalker. I can usually get a shot if I don’t have to give chase. I’m not as fast on the long pursuit as I used to be. Ah, but crafty I am.

How foolish it is to attempt to hide from me. This is a fairly rare orange variation of Clark’s Anemonefish (Amphiprion clarkii):I tried to get a shot in the clear, but finally gave up and accepted this one instead. I can pretend that I intended it that way.

PRESENTER: See how the timid anemonefish attempts to hide behind the tentacles of the anemone? It seldom exposes itself to danger by leaving the poisonous, protective arms of its host. This symbiotic relationship is reinforced by the protection that the anemonefish receives from the anemone. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Works for me.

Nudibranchs are a pushover. This Phyllidia varicosa  moves so slowly that the whole idea of evasion is silly:

I love to photgraph nudis. I can just float in the water with my camera about 5cm from the little devil and relax while I snap away.

The nidibranch is none the wiser.

Today’s interesting development concerns the Facebook/email hack that I mentioned a few days ago in The Birds! It seems that my Facebook friend had been hacked and the emails urgently asking for money to escape London were sent to her Facebook friends by the hacker. I noticed that the same person returned to Facebook, so I sent her a message asking if she had, perchance, recently been to London. She related the hacking incident to me. It is a sad tale. It reminds me to keep my own security up. I was happy to find that I had not been suckered into an elaborate fake Facebook friend scheme. She is real, and a nice person at that. I’m slightly less cynical than I was a couple of days ago. That’s always a good way to start the week.

Speaking of starting the week, here’s a Monday sunrise for you:I’ve seen better, but this one will do. I you click to enlarge, you’ll see that I caught a man in his canoe just where the sun is reflecting on the water.

Today we’re doing mostly Blennys. I’ve had quite a few of these cute little fish here before. You can find them by putting blenny in the search box. You’ve seen the Three-Lined Blenny (Ecsenius trilineatus)  before on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi:The details of the eyes are interesting, if you care to examine them by clicking to enlarge the image. Blennys are usually small fish, some species are among the smallest fish on the planet. Some Gobys are even smaller.

And here, for your viewing pleasure, is a fish that you’ve never seen before on MPBM. If fact, you’ll have to look closely to see it at all:It’s a Tripplespot Blenny (Crossosalarias macrospilus)  and this is the first one that I’ve managed to digitize:

Here’s another shot of the same specimen. It was moving around nervously from place to place. Where it landed here on this leather coral its camouflage doesn’t work very well:

The common name makes no sense to me. I see only one big spot.

You’ve seen the Latticed Sandperch (Parapercis clathrata)  several times here, mostly females. I admit a bias towards photographing females:Males of this species have a big, black spot on each side just above the pectoral fins behind the eyes. You can see in this young specimen that it is just developing. You can see an adult male specimen in this post.

I’ll toss a little colour onto this page with one of the reddest fish that I know, the Scarlet Soldierfish (Myripisits pralinia):They tend to hang around in these little caves in the reef. You can see another one in this post.

It’s time now to go out to check for the sunrise quality level. I know, I know, it’s a dirty job. Such is the life of a beach bum.

I sometimes enjoy musing that I have some smidgen of artistic talent. Not so. I can’t draw water. There are so many things that I would love to be able to do, but I’m simply too bone lazy to expend the effort. Man, I would love  to be able to play the piano. I’ve taken countless lessons, some recently, but I have no discipline to practice, therefore my keyboard skills suck swamp water. I’d also love to paint; it looks so easy! Alas, it’s beyond my reach. But, I can  Photoshop!

This nice sunrise shot seemed born to be a watercolour. So, I turned it into one in a couple of minutes:It’s so easy that it’s embarrassing. I suppose that Turner laboured for days to get something that looks roughly (very  roughly) like this.

Ah yes, were not here today to talk about art. A few days ago, I gave you Bite Me Red Fish featuring the Scarlet Soldierfish (Myripristis pralinia).  As I was mining the folder if images from that day, I came across a couple of more that are worth a peek. Here’s one of three of them crowded into the little passageway between the rocks where they were vainly attempting to hide from me:

It seems to be getting a little crowded in there.

Here is the interesting shot. There are some species of  creatures called isopods that parasitise fish. The one that you see here, Anilocra laticaudata,  specialises in Soldierfish:

I’ve shown you this before in this post. As I mention there, the males that wear an isopod have more luck breeding; the females seem to prefer them over unadorned mates. Well, that’s the strange world of fish for you.

Now I shall inflict upon you yet another image of  Christmas Tree Worms (Spirobranchus giganteus):If you think that there will be relief from Christmas Tree Worms in the near future, think again. Xmas is coming soon; you’ll be seeing more of thes curious little decorations.

Okay, okay, but what about the guttata? That’s another critter that you have seen here recently. That’s because it is a fish high on my list for exploitation. I have a few species which I am determined to photograph to the best of my ability with the gear that I own (New Canon G11 coming soon! Whoopee!). This is the very pretty fish the Spotted Shrimpgoby (Amblyeleotris guttata):
And, I think that the shot above is probably about as good as I can do with the Canon G10. It’s fun to take inexpensive gear such as the Canon G series underwater and run it ragged. It’s like squeezing a lemon hard to get the last drops of juice for that one last glass of lemonade.

I like squeezing lemons.

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.