Marine Life Encounters Blog

 I’m not making the night dive because my cold has caught up with me but Ned and Liberty are carrying on, happy to be back at work. I’m off to bed and will leave it to Ned to report on the night dive. 

Crustacean Hunters: Ned and Liberty

Another Hingebeak for the book

Kick-in-the-Britches-Good First Night Dive It was just Liberty and me who shoved away from the KBR dock at 6 PM for the first night dive of the trip. Poor Anna remained in the room nursing a head full of sniffles – the artifact of a rather nasty cold picked up on our flight over. Because nearly everything in the sea loves to eat crustaceans, most crabs, shrimps and lobsters only venture out from their hiding holes after sunset – a behavior which has necessitated a steady routine of night diving ever since we began working on a Pacific critter ID guide four years ago. Eagle-eyed Liberty, our longtime friend and indispensable dive guide had discovered a species of hingebeak shrimp the month before at Batu Angus (Burned Rock) that he didn’t think we had photographed previously. And as usual he was right. It is a red and white striped beauty that fills yet another void in our ever growing files of marine invertebrates. But the new hingebeak was only the beginning of our two-hour underwater bonanza.

A new Saron Shrimp

Batu Angus, one of Anna’s and my many favorite dive sites, is a narrow tributary formed by the collapse of an ancient lava tube that angles inland from the northern mouth of the Strait toward the black slopes of Dua Saudara, one of two volcanic peaks that dominates the mainland. If you have been to the Strait before, you might remember the area as the site of the famed Mandarinfish dive. The same rubble bed that hides the Mandarins during the day shelters a prolific set of eye-popping critters that slip out after the lights go out. One of these nocturnal characters just happened to be a species of shrimp from genus Saron also missing from our photographic collection.  

 Adding to the evening’s windfall was a cleaner shrimp in genus Urocaridella busily picking parasites from a sleeping Blackspotted Puffer.

Blackspotted puffer being cleaned

 And a splendid little two-inch juvenile Pinnate Batfish flitting about the rubble bottom in all its black and orange glory.