April 10 Diving News

It's April, and it's hot in the Philippines. Water temperature went above 28'C. The green algue is still there but started receding. Diving is good, the grey reef shark is still at Yapak. Last week it charged toward us2, 3 times to veer away the last moment, it came as close as 3-4m from me. I wondered whether it was feeling agressive, whether any of us was going to be attacked, because normally grey reef sharks would just hang in the current. However we all ended the dive safely.

Pygmy seahorses are back at Crocodile island (picture courtesy Craig Steward - Can you find it? If not, look for the tail in the center of the picture)! They are still very, very small, so I'd recommend a magnifying glass to see them properly. They were found in an area where there had been pygmy seahorses years ago. Unfortunately, however, a careless diver stepped on the fan, it got broken then seahorses left it. Luckily for us the sea fan recovered, so pygmy seahorses came back to the same fan, then a typhoon blew away the sea fan, ever since we didn't see any pygmy seahorses there till a few days ago. Let's hope this time nobody would disturb them and they would grow big and fat enough to spot easily.

A couple of days ago I did another beach night dive. I was hoping to see sea hares or melibes mate, because an instructor friend of mine saw hundreds of them mate on April 15. I knew from experience that nothing would happen the following night, but a few days later they might mate again. So I waited till April 20. Well, we didn't see sea hare or melibe mate, on the other hand, saw reeftop ghost pipefishes mate!!! Belly to belly as I saw seahorses do on TV. Craig tried but with the macro lens he had and as these fellas were turning, he couldn't get a good shot of the bellies, still you can see that these two were staying unnaturally close to each other. Later I also saw two rub their neck against each other, then seperate. I don't know whether these were the ones which I had seen mate, whether they were saying, "thank you for the great night" or whether these were different ones, and they checked out each other and decided not to go ahead??? Before I found them mating, I noticed that instead of crawling on the reef as usual, they were hovering motionless mid-water, which was a very strange behaviour. Obviously this gesture precedes a mating, so maybe they were displaying their readiness to mate? A species of sea hare, Aplysia, also swim very actively on their mating might instead of moving lethargically on the bottom. So whenever you notice a strange behaviour, even from something you have seen hundreds of times before, pay close attention, you may witness some mindblowing action!