Ok - I know I have mentioned this in the past, but during night dives, you quite often get swarmed with blood worms. To be honest, I hate them... they are super annoying, they get in the way of your photos (more on that later), and they can swarm your camera and get clumped up in your strobe and you don't notice it and you put your strobe in your camera case and they all die and your camera case smells horrible (yeah - true and quite disgusting story).

Anyway, there are a couple ways you can deal with them on a dive. First, you can just turn your lights out and swim around in the dark for a while and they go away (I had to resort to this several times this trip. It isn't ideal as it does get a bit spooky being down there with no light at all, but if you stay semi-close to another diver, you can sort of see). Second, you can dump them off on another diver - sort of the same principle here, but you just take your light next to theirs, then turn yours off and swim away... the person with a light on gets stuck with all the blood worms.

And then there's option three... feed stuff with them. This time, it is a banded coral shrimp (Stenopus hispidus) that managed to snag one and have a nice meal on me.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, 1/200th sec at f/6.3. Image Stabilization on. ISO 400. Ikelite Housing and Port and Ikelite 161 Strobe in TTL Mode. Raw conversion and cropped in Photoshop CS5. (mouseover for original uncropped version).

I really should have been shooting with a narrower aperture to get more depth of field, but I did manage to get this one with the focus right on the shrimp's face. Unfortunately, with all those legs and antennae and blood worms swimming around, there is a bit of visual confusion in this shot.

But still, it is one less blood worm in the world, and one happier banded coral shrimp with a full belly.

- Bill