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 Read more…
Day 4 Matt and Mike switched boats today in order to start diving with the other half of the group. We all headed out to the north end of the bay and ended up having a pygmy seahorse extravaganza. Matts group saw bargibanti, denise, and pontohi pygmies all on the Read more…
Day 1 We were very happy to welcome 12 eager photo students last night to NAD-Lembeh Resort! After a brief introduction of the instructors, Mike Veitch and Matt Oldfield, along with NAD’s owners Simon and Zee Buxton, we had everyone introduce themselves and tell us a little about themselves. In Read more…
Gobies belong to one of the most speciose fish families consisting of around 2000 members. Most of the gobies are rather small and have very little direct defence against predators. Thus, most gobies in reef areas live in close association with animals such as wire corals, branching Read more…
When I arrived in Lembeh this time it was just after Christmas. However, I was up for another Christmas treat. Simon here from NAD had ordered a bunch of cool stuff from Nightsea, strobe filters, filters for the lens and a cool pair of yellow spectacles, which waited for me here. I have now tried this system during my stay and will in this blog give a short overview over what I learned from shooting it. But first of all I want to give a brief explanation over what fluorescence is, and why we can find it in nature. BTW, the complete system is available for rent here in NAD if you wish to try it out.
When I visited Lembeh in September/October there were flamboyant cuttlefish around in numbers that I have never seen before. On more or less every dive, we saw one or more flamboyants. Blue ring octopus were not as common, but still there was hardly a day when we didn´t see them. Read more…
Prey are well adapted to evade predators, and predators are correspondingly well adapted to catch prey. For most of us it is pretty reasonable to accept that such adaptation happens by natural selection, leading to long-term evolution of animals, making them better to either catch prey or evade predators, whatever end of the food chain you happen to be on. Thus natural selection affects traits such as foraging efficiency or anti-predator behaviours that lead to longer lives, quicker growth rates and, both directly and indirectly, higher reproduction rates. Most of my earlier blogs have more or less built on the assumption of natural selection affecting adaptations of animals.
Whenever you visit the same dive area several times, some dive sites seem to consistently deliver more than others, and, correspondingly, some less than you would wish. Here in Lembeh my favorites are the Aer Bajo sites and Hairball, where many uneventful starts of dives have been turned around to Read more…
Well, as Lembeh must be the frogfish capital of the world, and frogfish are some of my favourite critters, I think that frogfish actually merits another blog entry. So here it is. Frogfish are probably most known for their built in bait, an illicium or “fishing rod” that is topped Read more…
For some reason certain animals are on the “cool” list that everyone wants to see and photograph and others are placed on the “not so cool” list and get ignored by most divers and photographers. Scarcity and cuteness seems to be two important factors determining the popularity of an animal. Read more…