Ok - a few posts ago, I mentioned that I would share a photo of an arrow crab that caught a blood worm just as I was taking photos of it.

The blood worms are harmless worms that swim in the water. Usually they are less than an inch long, though we did see some that were several feet long. During night dives, they are attracted to the lights, and honestly can get downright annoying. When you get too many in front of your dive lights, there are a couple things you can do. First, you can just turn off your dive light and they'll disperse - if a friend is nearby, they'll all swarm to their light while you swim away laughing. Second, you can feed them to brain corals... simply move your light close to a brain coral and the blood worms haplessly swim into the coral and are trapped and eaten. Or, if you're really lucky, you can feed other reef critters...

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/120th sec at f/8. Image Stabilization on. ISO 640. Ikelite Housing and Port with dual Ikelite 161 Strobes in TTL Mode. Raw conversion and cropped in Photoshop CS5. (mouseover for original uncropped version).

I seem to have taken a break from processing photos. I have seven dives left to process, so hopefully with the added time off from the holiday, I can possible get through the rest of them and get on a more regular posting schedule.

Stay tuned.

- Bill