I won the Google at Turtlehead Snake

Well, it’s not a competition, BUT…

Of course my main goals as a wildlife videographer are my own enjoyment of nature, the challenge of approaching and observing and capturing a rare or beautiful or otherwise fascinating animal, and secondly, I want to communicate this fascination with my audience, for their pleasure, and – I am not overestimating my influence here a bit – that the audience maybe, maybe might appreciate nature a bit more and become a tiny bit more active in protecting it and not messing it up.

So, these are my main goals. Doing well on social media and in search engines is a means, not a goal. Nevertheless it’s nice to see that some of my shots come up very high in the Google image search.

I recently wrote about the mushroom coral pipefish, and how my image of it is number one in a Google image search. It turns out that my images are also ranked number one and four for the turtle-headed Sea Snake (Emydocephalus annulatus):

 

Number one is via the Ocean website of the famous Smithsonian institution, number four is via the iNaturalist page for the species. Both images are originally from my Flickr phoot feed, where all images are Creative Commons/non-commercial. I’m always happy to contribute to educational sites!

Okinawa, Japan, where I was living for five years, has a very healthy population of these sea snakes, hence I had many chances to get good shots of these. Curious animals, I believe they are specialized fish egg feeders. They would explore the reef, typically close to the bottom, and mostly ignore divers.

Finally, let me show you this super cool shot which I took in Oki on a dive together with my buddy Russell, a pair of turtle-head sea snakes mating! What aktschn!