23 September – 4 October 2009
What the heck is muck?
We have been diving in the Lembeh muck for the past 12 days and finding it so interesting we could hardly tear ourselves away from it. We must be mad, you’d think. How can diving silt and sand be interesting? Well, it is interesting because in seemingly nothing, we find LIFE. Life with variety and color that you can never imagine in your wildest dreams.
And life in the muck begins with babies. We have been seeing a huge assortment of babies that we must show what the “Nursery of the Seas” mean from the critter angle.
Baby Cowfish hovers and rotates in position like a little helicopter
Bright painted frogfish a mere 4 mm on the sand
A wiggling sweetlips so small and frisky
Baby Banggai cardinalfish so small its classic white dotted spots is not evident yet. Here it has a sea urchin for a home
Not quite the mommy, this lttle one takes care of its future siblings by fanning and plucking out dead eggs from the healthy clownfish eggs
How could this brilliant yellow boxfish ever think we can’t see it? It was indeed tiny but hey, it’s yellow with polka dots!
How our brilliant Indonesian guide Paulus can find these minute creatures is beyond us. This baby nudibranch is perfect. So small yet bearing everything a nudibranch should be – beautiful!
Many species of little lionfish were all over the sand in almost every dive. Come to think of it, scorpionfish of all types – and I mean ALL types or species abound here
