As all of you reading this blog probably knows, anemonefish are associated with host anemones and need such an association to survive. Biologists would call that obligate symbiosis. The obligate part is that the anemonefish need the anemone in order to survive, and the symbiosis is that they live together with the anemone. Maybe not…
Camouflage is used by prey to avoid detection by predators. Using camouflage is obviously in many cases a great idea, but it also has a number of costs, one of which is that the camouflaged prey lives life in the slow lane. Movements will have to be avoided as much as possible in order not…
More or less everything in nature, with the rare exception of an adult orca or a fully grown female great white shark will be prey for something else. One consequence of this is that fear will be a prevailing emotional status in nature, as bold and brave animals will be caught and eaten much quicker…
As discussed in an earlier blog, the Banggai cardinalfish, which are considered to be a vulnerable or threatened species in their original home of the Banggai islands, is an introduced species to Lembeh (the exact story about how this happened varies, from a broken seine net to a transport being late and an exporter just…
We just took a very short family break to Disney Hong Kong for a few days, and when we arrived yesterday we were met by a bunch of friends from Reef Photo Video in the US, and a whole bunch of shipping that arrived in our absence. Obviously shipping things around in Indonesia is time…
One of the most numerous and beautiful fish in Lembeh is the Banggai cardinalfish. Just a few years ago, this small black and white fish with delicate patterns was quite rare in the strait, but now it can be seen almost all through Lembeh. Yesterday I saw quite a number of them at Aw shucks,…
Yesterday`s blog on Batesian mimicry got me started thinking (thus the big tank of air, brain activity requires oxygen!). Batesian mimicry was about “parasitizing” on the true signal of something sending out an honest warning. This is a very special type of mimicry. Camouflage, where animals try to look like something more or less inedible,…
Mimicry in a biological sense is the similarity between two species that protect one of them or both. One species, the mimic, evolves to share traits with a noxious species, the model, with the fundamental purpose to send a signal from the mimic to a receiver (most often a predator) so that the…
A couple of weeks ago the title for being the ugliest animal in the world was awarded by the British science festival. Top contenders were the proboscis monkey, lice, the nowadays famous blobfish and a frog from lake Titicaca with the catching name the scrotum frog (it is, I promise! No, I did not make…
Cephalopods belong to the large group of animals known as molluscs. Generally molluscs do not move well, and when they do, it is by either gliding over a slime track or by using their external shells. But not the cephalopods. Cephalopods move very quickly and with very precise movements when that is needed. Most animals…