Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and the third is to confuse predators, since the blinking makes it very
di‹cult to pinpoint a moving flashlight fish's location. (This last strat-
egy certainly worked on us!)
With a newspaper, we tested the brightness of their light organ. Two
recently dead flashlight fish, we found, provided quite enough light to
read the paper easily in a dark room.
The flashlight fish turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip,
but we saw many other wonderful creatures as well. One particularly
fascinating creature was the three-inch scorpionfish called a lea‹sh (
Ta e -
nianotus triacanthus
). Lea‹sh live in shallow water in areas with pro-
fuse algal growth, and they come in a variety of colors—red, orange,
tan, brown: much like shades of seaweeds. I caught two lea‹sh and
when I placed them in the bottom of a bucket they immediately started
rocking back and forth as though they were pieces of red or brown al-
gae swaying in the surge. Obviously unaware that their normally e¤ec-
tive rocking behavior was a total failure in a bare bucket, the two fish
weren't even moving in unison. We found their out-of-place protec-
tive behavior rather comical, and I released them unharmed where I'd
picked them up.
The variety of fishes and invertebrates we saw was mind-boggling.
On every dive I came across species I'd never seen before nor even read
about in topics. I think I could have spent a year there before I'd be
able to say I was familiar with most of them. All this newness certainly
made each and every dive exciting.
On one dive Sylvia found a giant red and orange nudibranch (
Hexa-
branchus sanguineus
) that weighed several pounds. She named it
“Flower” and brought it up to show us, then returned it to where she'd
found it. We were most impressed with her colorful pet! We saw morays
of several species and sizes, including a beautiful pair of honeycomb
morays (
Gymnothorax favigineus
) soliciting cleaning services from a blue-
and-white cleaner wrasse (
Labroides dimidiatus
).
I was already familiar with the striking moorish idol and imperial
angels (
Pomacanthus imperator
), but I found the schools of little fairy
basslets charming (
Anthias
and
Pseudanthias
spp.) as they flitted among
the corals. These I'd never seen in an aquarium, and two or three species
of them seemed to be everywhere. Basslets are one of those fishes, like
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