New Dauin Underwater Footage

Since coming back to the Philippines in December of last year I have had the pleasure to do a few interesting dives with a camera. As usual, if you dive a lot eventually interesting action will happen in front of your camera. There is always an element of luck in nature image making!

During a night dive in Zamboanguita, just south of Dauin, I encountered a mantis shrimp. It was running around outside of its burrow, which is somewhat rare, but on top of that it was absolutely enormous. This seems to be one of Lysiosquillina maculata, the tiger/banded mantis shrimp, which is the biggest species of mantis shrimp know, and it must have been an individual close to the max size, ~ 40 cm:

 

During another night dive I caught a pair of crabs fighting. Crabs have a very emotional inner life: when faced with humans, they are very fearful, but against each other they can be very aggressive. These two fought over a territory, the base of an anemone. The fighting style seems to be most closely related to wrestling:

 

Enjoy & Best Fishes,

Klaus