One of the invertebrate species we surveyed… this species of sea urchin burrows into crevices in the reef and you only ever see them protruding out of a hole like this.
Category: Underwater
Sometimes I feel bad not being more specific on the species of critters I am sharing – remember that shrimp goby post from the other day? But sometimes it is really difficult. Case in point, this looks like a fairly distinct nudibranch, but once you…
One of the benthic animals that we identified for our surveys were zooanthids. We didn’t get to the level of species identification, and flipping through my reef creature ID book quickly, there is little info in there about them. This is a less common species…
The guy above is an Arc-eye Hawkfish and the gal (yes, I am sure it is a female because the males have wavy lines on their cheeks) is a Speckled Sandperch. Neither fish were among the ones we surveyed and I realize I was pretty…
Well, I found a quick way to get some more posts… I have a bunch of photos I’ve uploaded with the intention of sharing, but have not yet done so… So first up is a cool nudibranch that I only saw a couple times on…
These are almost always somewhere on a coral reef, and they’re always interesting to look at, and fun to make disappear with just a wave of your hand…
I should ID this little guy, and I wish I had been able to get a photo with his burrow-mate shrimp (they’re usually much more skittish and vanish before the fish do)… but for now, just sharing a photo of a cool fish…
These little guys were photographed inside one of the no-take reserves that Blue Ventures has helped the Velondriak association establish. We had completed our surveys of this site, so I got the bonus of getting to take the camera and do some “photographic surveying”.
On the same dive where we found those Nemobrotha Nudis, I managed to find this absolutely stunning Blue Dragon Nudibranch (Pteraeolidia ianthina). Today is a bit of a sad day though as I am leaving Andavadoaka and beginning my journey back towards home.
A couple closeups showing the corals feeding with their tentacles out during the day…
This little reef fish tends to live both in tabular corals (like the Indian Dascyllus I’ve shared before) as well as in anemones like this one…
We’ve started doing actual scientific survey dives at this point so I am not able to take my camera as often (though honestly, if I hadn’t struggled with it working properly earlier in the trip, I might have more photos). But one of our expedition…
I saw tiger flatworms in Indonesia, but I think these are some better photos. Flatworms are different from nudibranchs, but they kind of get lumped in with nudis as one of my favorite underwater critters. I’ve been lucky to see some really nice nudis and…
