The Aer Bajo dive sites are to me the essence of Lembeh diving. For me an optimal dive plan would include Aer Bajo on at least one dive every day! Sandy, somewhat silty slopes, initially giving the impression of not to many animals around, but always delivering something special. Furthermore, well into the dive, the…
What is that all about? The world is full of beautiful, exciting, warm places with a lot of stuff I haven´t seen. It seems quite overkill to return to Lembeh again and again, and even again. The first reason is that I find coral dives beautiful, but quite unexciting. It is nice every now and…
Commensalism requires one animal, the host, to accept the presence of another, without receiving anything for it, which, in itself, is not very complicated from an evolutionary point of view. Mutualism requires one animal to give advantages to another while at the same time receiving benefits from the other. At first sight this probably seems…
Mutualisms are close, long-term relationships between two species where both species benefit from the relationship. Mutualisms can, just as commensalisms, be obligate or facultative. They can also be endosymbiotic, that is one species living inside another, or ectosymbiotic, which is one species living on the surface of the other. One relationship that during a long…
On my day job part of my time is used to teach ecology for undergraduates in biology. Maybe not such a surprise, many of the best examples of interactions between species that I use in my teaching come from marine ecosystems. This is especially true when dealing with symbiosis theory. Symbiosis means “together living”, and…
Update 1. In the blog on cephalopods I mentioned that we still had a couple of species to be seen. Not so now, we saw an algae octopus yesterday and on this morning’s first dive, not one but two hairy octopus were found. I guess that´s it for the cephalopods! Maybe not if we get…
Lembeh is a very good place for seahorse hunting. Not only does Lembeh have several “proper” seahorses, which is medium-sized fish, looking like a seahorse should look like but also at least three pygmy seahorses, a number of pipefish and the almost iconic Lembeh sea dragon as well as their relatives, ornate ghost pipefish and…
Invertebrates are in general stupid animals. Mussels, snails, and most other members of the mollusk group would certainly score pretty low on any scale of creative brightness, but their life style on the other hand does not require a brilliant mind. The only exception is the cephalopods, translated from greek as headfoot, such as the…
The molluscs is a big and very diverse group consisting of animals as different as a mussel and an octopus! Most colorful and strikingly patterned among the molluscs are the cowries, used as currency in different cultures over time and now prized collector items due to their shining and often brightly coloured and patterned shell.…
Being an animal is being filled with protein and fat! That is probably the scariest fact small animals have to face. Protein and fat is on the whole extremely uncommon in nature. Compared to the ubiquitous carbohydrates, which plants just require some sun and some fancy chemistry to create, protein and fat is really hard…