Post Quarantine Underwater Fun

I’m back underwater! In the part of the Philippines where I live, Negros Oriental, scuba diving was not allowed during the stricter part of the covid quarantine. The quarantine level has now been reduced, and we can dive again, and dive I did. I did some underwater image making while I was in the ocean:

Videos

A real highlight was the observation of a Chromis mating aggregation, with 100s of fish converging to lay eggs in the seagrass. I spent a whole dive observing the spectacle:

In this video I filmed a large marine snail, Cassis cornuta, which feeds on sea urchins. The urchins know this, and in the video one of the notices the Cassis, emerges from the sand, and runs away. This really happened.

And here I got to film some eels: One of them is chasing a stingray, the other one is pretending to be a sea snake. More cunning than they are generally given credit for, those eels!

Photography

I also got some stills – you can scroll through the Flickr album linked below. I got stills of the mating Chromis, too, as well as mating cardinalfish, Klein’s butterflyfish feeding on fish eggs, and some minute shrimps.

This, to me, is the highlight of my photography during the last three weeks, this is a really rare goby, Oplopomus caninoides, which is, to my knowledge, not yet formally described. Many thanks to Chris Thacker for IDing the fish.