Commensals

Commensals have to be my favourite dive finds… and it seems that with my eyes and instinct, I never come up empty-handed!  The real challenge for me isn't finding them... but getting the camera to see the same thing my eyes do...

(Mantis shrimp - a creature with eyes hundreds of times more potent than my 'eagle eyes', and the most sophisticated eye in the animal kingdom!  They have 16 different photoreceptor classes, compared to the human 3, which allows them to see in 3D, including UV and polarized light! )

Anyway, back to the commensals...  none of these critters is more than about 2cm long...

(Coral shrimp on an acropora branching coral)

Even the jetty at Meosmanggara village, which at first glance didn’t look too promising except for the presence of absolutely insane amounts of bait fish (the circles of dark clouds around the wooden jetty pilings below), there were little critters to be found!

Anenomes and bubble coral are guaranteed places to find symbiotic relationships:

The clown fish are the most conspicuous residents of anenomes, but they often share their tentakely home with many other residents...  all variety of shrimps (sometimes almost completely transparent!), porcelain crabs, etc...

One of my favourite reef residents is the feather star... although they look like plants with dye-happy hairstylists, they're actually animals (cousins of seastars and seacucumbers, in silhouette here)...

Their colourful waving arms often become home to commensals as well, providing shelter and protection for ghost pipe fish, squat lobsters, crinoid shrimp, cling fish, etc, which perfectly mimic their hosts' colour for camouflage...

crinoid shrimp (hiding his face behind a feather star arm)  (sorry about the foggy picture... but even more sorry about my fogging camera housing... i haven't been able to find a fix for it... so by the end of every dive/snorkel session, my pics all look like this...)

 (ornate ghost pipefish - not my pic (source: nevillecoleman.com.ar) - but shows how perfectly cammo'd he is!)

(these crinoid cling fish were squiggling away around a feather star on Gag island)

These are a few previous finds... a hairy fairy crab peering out from the outer folds on a purple barrel sponge...

...an teeny tiny emperor shrimp on a sea cucumber...

and the classic...  pygmy seahorse!

Monkey Fish?

Ahhh… and another fabulous mystery solved for me… I found a very very very strange critter while diving in Lembeh Strait (only a few dives, and my fist in this ‘critter haven’)… Nobody I showed it to on the dive, nor to whom I described it afterward was able to tell me what it might be.  It was almost indistinguishable from the silty bottom on which I found it… and if it hadn’t been for a slight movement that I caught out of the corner of my eye, I might have overlooked it altogether… It was an oddly round shape, almost like a head with no body to speak of… kinda of fuzzy/furry, like it was wearing a coat of the seafloor.  And it waddled… I’m not kidding… it was sort-of walking/struggling along on it’s rounded pectoral fins.  I wrote it off to an anomaly, possibly a deformation of a scorpionfish or something… BUT, have just found out that it has a name:  Monkey fish!  How appropriate… and apparently it’s quite rare to encounter, so now I feel even more lucky!  Of course, I didn’t have my camera on that dive, but have found a few pics since to add here to give you an idea… apparently I saw it at the height of it’s camouflaged state… when it sheds its ‘coat’ it looks more like this!

Sailor's Eyeball

An entity on the reef that remained a mystery to me for quite a long time (mostly because whenever I saw one I was alone) is the Sailor's Eyeball.  So, unable to point it out and later ask a dive mate for an explanation, I went on wondering (and assuming) whenever I saw this strange metallic phenomenon... 

Indeed, this out-of-place, medicine-ball-looking, reef being is the largest single-celled algae one encounters below the waves... it's known as a Sailor's Eyeball!

Sea Rabbits

"Sea Rabbits"!?!  Sometimes you really have to love the Indonesian translation for things… In English, they are the difficult to pronounce and remember, Nudibranchs, or affectionately called Nudi’s (actually a little bit of a double-entendre, since these sea slugs are without a shell)!

Anyway, I just found out that the Indonesians refer to them as Kelincin Laut (or Sea Rabbits)… take a look for yourself and see how appropriate this is!  With their rabbit-ear-like rhinopores, and their fluffy cotton tails (actually their lungs)...

I found this nudi 2 feet from the Kalabia under the jetty at the village of Meos Manggara in Raja Ampat:

And this one in the process of laying its eggs on a cement piling at the jetty at the village of Fam.  I'd seen these beautiful floral arrangement-like egg deposits before, but never actually encountered a nudi in the process of laying them - so special!  It was a split moment in time as well, since several hours later when I went in to check on the progress, the 'mama' was nowhere to be found!

There are hundreds (thousands?) of species of nudis, if you can imagine!? 

I generally prefer the above 'soft and fluffy' type to the more-common (at least in my experience), 'hard and knobbly' ones like the one below.

Oh, and to give you an idea of the size of these little guys - there are only a few species that get much bigger than this... 

Underwater Recently

I haven't been diving nearly as much as I would like, but I have snuck in a few over the last few months, and every time I get the chance I jump in for a snorkel.  In fact, as far as lighting goes, with my simple little camera setup, snorkeling is better for pictures!  So... I will share a little over my next few blogs... (I'm sure this is nothing compared to the IMAX movie you guys saw recently, Mom & Dad!)

At my first dive ever on a site called "Chicken Reef" (even though it is within 15 minutes of our field station), we were surrounded by about 15 black-tip reef sharks.  I'm always thrilled to see sharks on the reef, since they've become so rare in recent years (due to the senseless Asian craving for shark-fin soup).

On this last trip with the Kalabia, my snorkelling mostly consisted of around and beneath the local village jetty before or after we ran the education programs - an experience not to be knocked... many interesting things lurking around here!

... this massive mantis shrimp is the biggest I've ever seen (sorry nothing in the pic to give it scale, but its hole in the sand was about 20cms in diameter)!

Under the big concrete pilings of the jetty at Fam I found at least four different species of pipe fish (Look closely - some are barely indistinguishable from the substrate)...

And of course, there were the usual jetty-lurking suspects of stone fish, scorpion fish, lion fish, old shoes, and tires...

(Stone fish are one of the most venemous fish in the sea... although they aren't dangerous unless you provoke them (or step on them accidentally because you didn't see them - they blend in perfectly with the rubble or reef, hence the name!?))

(Can you find the scorpion fish?  It could be dangerous if you don't see him in time and put your hand down on him on the reef!!!)  

(Lionfish display their venomous nature with bright colours to ward off predators... they're spines are dangerous for humans as well, although not necessarily deadly... as I can tell you from experience!)

In one dive, I encountered several new species... 

...I looked into a deep hole under some coral...

...and discovered a new species of lobster...

... and right around the corner was a new formation of mushroom coral that I have never seen before!

Most Popular Toy in Raja Ampat

The simplest pleasures...

Every kid wants a toy with tires...

I guess when the bike dies, or oxidizes because of the salt-sea air, this is phase two!?

Raja Ampat - Origin, Myth and Mystery

Raja Ampat literally means "Four Kings".  The root of the name comes from the four kings that ruled the four main islands of region until the 16th century or so, Misool, Batanta, Salawati and Waigeo.

These kings were not born as natural human beings, however...

As legend has it, there were actually seven eggs.  These eggs,  laid either by a great mythical megapod bird, or by a dragon or crocodile (depending on who you hear the story from), were found by a couple in Kabui Bay (on the island of Waigeo).  One egg hatched a female (who was called Pintolee... what became of her isn't exactly clear, but it seems maybe she was washed away as far as Biak island where she had a child called Gura Besi... who is a hero in his own right), one hatched a ghost who is thought to protect the sea in Raja Ampat, and one never hatched, and became a stone egg... the remaining four eggs hatched the four kings of Raja Ampat.  They each dispersed to each of the four largest islands, and shared the area, living together in peace established by alliances between these traditional kingdoms based on a common origin.  The four original kings were:  War (the king of Waigeo), Betani (the king of Salawati), Dohar (the king of Batanta) and Mohamad (the king of Misool).

Certainly if you speak to anyone native to the area the story still holds great power, and the belief and reverence for the families of these four kings in Raja Ampat is very apparent.  And if you visit the island of Waigeo, you can feel the mystery and power that it holds.

The last remaining stone egg was placed in the 'heart' of Raja Ampat, and can still be found by those worthy of a visit to its sacred resting place, in Kali Raja (The King's River), in between Kabui Bay and Mayalibit Bay on the island of Waigeo.

That's the way the story goes as I was told it by a descendent of the king of Misool.

Laundry Day

Laundry day is every day...  and luckily the 'seven suns' in Papua dry your clothes in mere minutes, no matter where you hang them!  It's a bit ironic, isn't it... the sun that makes you sweat so much you have to wash your clothes several times a day also facilitates that process?

I think the impromptu laundry lines make for fabulous photographic subjects... as you can tell!?

Fantastic Florals

A few fabulous flowers that I saw for the first time in Missol in May...

(i know it's a hibiscus... but a colour-variation i have never seen before...)

... this one I found out after is the tree whose root is used as a poison to capture fish (called "akar bore"):

... and this leaf's waxy cuticle allows perfect pearl-like drops to collect in a light rain.  It reminds me of one of my favourite Khalil Gibran quotes:  I discovered the secret of the sea in meditation upon the dewdrop.