Below is a list of some of the varieties of marine life we saw while diving around Kwaj. It's not a complete list by any means, but you get the idea... lots of fish!!
- Anemonefish
- Angelfish
- Bannerfish
- Batfish/ Spadefish
- Blackspotted Sole
- Bluestripe Snapper
- Butterflyfish (Threadfin, Chevroned, Indian Redfin, Teardrop, Raccoon, Reticulated, Saddled, Pacific Double-Saddle, Lined)
- Cornetfish
- Eels
- Goatfish
- Gobies
- Groupers (Honeycomb, Camoflage, Coral)
- Humbug Damselfish
- Moorish Idols
- Octopus
- Onespot Wormfish
- Pipefish
- Pompanos
- Pufferfish (Indian Toby, Porcupine, Guineafowl, Map)
- Rays (Spotted Eagle, Sting, Moray)
- Redfin Bream
- Sand Perch
- Sharks (Nurse, White-Tip, Black-Tip)
- Soldierfish
- Starfish
- Stonefish
- Triggerfish (Picasso, Yellow Margin, Titan)
- Turtles (Green Sea, Hawksbill)
- Unicornfish
- Whitepatch Razorfish
- Wrasses (Bird, Slingjaw, many other varieties)
- Yellow Boxfish
Fish are absolutely fascinating. Really, I can't stress this enough. I don't think they get enough credit for how interesting they are!
Some of them go through amazing transitions during their lifecycle - you wouldn't believe it's the same fish. Take the emperor angelfish, for example. A juvenile emperor angelfish looks like
this, and an adult emperor angelfish looks like
this. We caught a glimpse of a juvenile one at a dive site called the Nursery, which is a small mound of coral a few metres across, with tens of thousands of little fish living in it and hovering in a column above it. This juvenile emperor angelfish is only a few inches long and incredibly cute! It's one of Marissa's faves and quickly became one of mine, too.
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| Juvenile emperor angelfish |
Other fish engage in bizarre feats of body part migration. The sole starts its life as an upright swimming fish, with one eye on each side of its head. However, shortly after birth, one eye begins to migrate around to the other side of its head! Once both eyes are on the same side, the sole from then on swims on its side with its eyes facing upwards and its eyeless underside flattening out to allow it to move speedily across the ocean floor. We chased the one in this photo around for a while, and the way it skated over the sand made me think of some kind of stealthy, desert-camouflaged army machine!
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| Can you spot the sole? |
Of course, then there are all the fish that can change their outward appearance to blend in with their surroundings and thus hide from predators. Or the ones that can change their outward appearance to lure in their prey. Or the ones that can decide to change from female to male because no other males are available to control a harem of females. I'd better change the subject, because there is no end to the interestingness of fish!
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| Can you spot the camouflage grouper? |
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| ...There he is! |
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| Honeycomb grouper |
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| Coral grouper |
Another of my favourites were the pufferfish. I loved the porcupine pufferfish, which look like cartoon characters with their big bug eyes. I also adored the Indian toby pufferfish, which have fluorescent blue speckles. I was particularly smitten with a baby Indian toby pufferfish, about 1 inch long, that lived in the Nursery. Unfortunately we didn't get any good photos of them... it's not as easy as you might think to take photos of fish! They generally don't just sit there grinning inanely and saying "cheeeeeeese" while you fiddle with your camera. But you can google them if you really want to see what they look like!
Batfish (aka spadefish) are one type that do pose quite nicely, however. These elegant creatures tended to swim in pairs or trios, and sometimes accompanied us for quite a while.
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| Juvenile spadefish |
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| Adult spadefish |
Various other fish...
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| Moorish idol |
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| Moorish idols |
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| Threadfin butterflyfish |
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| Pompano |
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| Cornetfish |
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| Goby |
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| Map pufferfish |
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| Violet soldierfish |
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| Bluestripe snapper |
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| Yellow margin triggerfish |
(Speaking of triggerfish, I really liked the Picasso triggerfish, but we didn't get any photos of them. Google them to see a real work of art!)
This is an octopus, which always excited the locals a lot when they found one...
A blue starfish...
...And a line of squid keeping guard!
We saw a lot of small, coral-dwelling fish like these ones...
...And we had a particular fondness for these cute little humbug damselfish!
This is me having some hands-on experiences...
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| Spider conch |
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| Cushion star |
...But the weirdest thing I touched was the sea cucumber that Peter is holding in
this photo from an earlier post. It felt pliable, spongy and solid all at the same time!
One of the things that always delighted us was finding sea anemones, which were usually home to anemonefish. Anemonefish are also known as clownfish (i.e. Nemo!), so be warned: there are some cute photos coming up!
It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that
sea anemones are animals, not plants. They are in fact "predatory animals" that eat small fish and shrimp, which they capture by releasing a toxin from their tentacles to paralyse their prey, allowing them to move it to their mouth (in the centre of the tentacles) for digestion. I assume there is some clause in the lease agreement between the anemones and anemonefish that prevents the anemone landlords from unleashing this unpleasant-sounding fate on their small, tantalisingly edible anemonefish tenants! (...In fact, I just happened across the answer
here.)
Here are some anemones, and their resident anemonefish...
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| Carpet anemone |
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Magnificent sea anemone
(that's its name, not just an accurate description!) |
And just in case you thought anemones mustn't be very colourful...!
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| Carpet anemone |
The spectacular specimen above can be viewed in a video (someone else's, not ours) by clicking
here.
I've saved my favourite series of photos for last. Near the end of the trip, Marissa took us on a dive to a sunken LCM (
Landing Craft Mechanized) near Emon Beach. Before the dive, she told us we would see a beautiful big anemone, quite close to the surface and thus a perfectly lit photo opportunity... especially if it were balled up to feed.
As light and colour both decrease the deeper you dive, most of our dive photos are fairly carefully edited to dial back the "blueness" and reinstate the real colours. Not the following photos, though... this was probably only 15 feet or less from the surface, and these photos turned out exactly how it looked to us. (As a comparison, the magnificent sea anemone in the photo above is probably a very similar-looking animal, just much deeper underwater... and hence the lack of bright colour.)
We were lucky enough to come across this anemone during its full-blown feeding stage. It was displaying a gorgeous shade of purple, and sweet little anemonefish peeked out from amongst its tentacles. This sight was definitely one of my Kwaj diving highlights. Without further ado...
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| (Marissa's photo) |
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| (Marissa's photo) |
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