New Fish Videos

I have finally gotten around to editing some of the video footage which had hung out on my hard drive for a while! Enjoy!

This is a video of a lovely, lovely reef in Malapascua, which I filmed when I was with People and the Sea, a Malapascua-based environmental NGO. These guys and girls are doing a great job, they survey the reefs for biodiversity (underwater), and conduct outreach activities for little kids and high school students, as well as beach-clean ups and mangrove plantings (on land).

I had done a lot of diving in Malapascua, but actually not been to that “Coral Garden” site before. It’s only a few meters deep, and more of a snorkeling than a classic dive site. But what a lovely reef! Fairly healthy coral cover, and lots of small fishes to admire.

I filmed the next piece of fish aktschn on the same site. It’s the kind of footage one can’t seek out – it has to find you. Here, a school of marine catfish invade the territory of a damselfish. The damsel defends the edible algae growing on the sea weed – aggressively! The catfish don’t care much about the hapless damsel and just move on after a while. I love fish behavior like that.

This next video I shot with a cheap action cam, in “sports” mode, with 120 frames per second, 4 times what you would normally get. The footage turned out monochrome, due to the low light levels underwater (even though that wasn’t very deep at all, maybe 12 meters – but the “Sports” mode needs more light). I wanted to bring this camera with the fast frame rate on the dive to be able to get footage of the razor wrasses, which hide under the sand at lightening speed, if they feel threatened. Razor wrasses are quite common in Dauin, Negros. I didn’t just get video of the wrasse hiding in a rush, but also an attack by a hungry lizardfish on such a wrasse.