Dauin: Foreign Diver Caught Coloring Anemone Fish Eggs

Dauin, Negros Oriental province, Philippines: It’s a great tradition to color eggs for Easter, which is coming up, but please stick to chicken eggs. It’s inappropriate, harmful and plainly illegal to color the eggs of wildlife you might encounter on your forest walk or scuba dive. Yes – scuba dive, this is what happened this week in Dauin, the scuba tourism Mekka of the central Philippines.

Popular local dive guide Don Pomacentrus-Rodriguez was showing a group of diving tourists the wonders of the Dauin underwater world when he encountered a very unusual sight: The eggs of an anemonefish (“Nemo”), which had been colored. Normally these eggs, laid onto a rock next to the fish’s home anemone, are bright orange, but in this case color had been applied, like onto Easter eggs, to make three small patches green, pink and yellow, respectively.

“When we ended the dive and walked back onto shore, I saw a large, hairy foreign guy exit the water at the same time, with a camera and three spray cans in his hands. You do the math.”. While we are not good at math, we encourage everyone to report possible sightings of the suspect or of similar fish egg coloring instances to the Filipine Underwater Crime Unit (FUC-U) via their Facebook page or per email. Wildlife harassment can not, shall not and will not be tolerated, even if the victims are “only” fish.

Below is a photograph of the unnecessary wildlife harassment (image courtesy of Don Pomacentrus-Rodriguez):

Check the date of the post please! Best Fishes,

Klaus

PS: Are there even gobies?