Ned and I arrived at our second home, Kungkungan Bay Resort in the famous Lembeh Strait, Indonesia yesterday afternoon. On the ride from the airport, we realized that our first trip here was ten years ago! We spent several hours catching up with friends and touring the latest additions to the resort before jetlag caught up with us and we crashed for the next 11 hours.
Over the next two weeks, friends will be flying in to dive in the area, before we all collect at the end of the month to travel 500 miles east to Sorong in eastern Indonesia for a voyage through the Raja Ampat area.
In our December field report from Papua New Guinea, I talked about my captivation with the Convict goby, which I have since learned is more correctly called the Convict fish.Last week, just before we left home, Ned and I saw Michele and Howard Hall’s latest IMAX film, Under the Sea, where we watched the very same fish on the big screen.(By the way, we think Under the Sea is the Hall’s best IMAX film to date. We especially appreciate their strong climate change message.) One of the scenes shows the large 10-inch adult Convict fish greeting the swarm of ¾ inch juveniles streaming into its burrow at dusk. This only served to make me more determined to find an adult and its den while we are diving Lembeh. I’ve seen juveniles here but have never been able to locate their burrow. I shot video of adults and juveniles in PNG, but the burrow was located in such a silty location that every time the adult spit out a mouthful of muck, I had to wait 20 minutes for the visibility to clear. So, the hunt is on!
Flamboyant Cuttlefish laying eggs
Ned and Paul will continue to concentrate their efforts on critter hunting this trip as this will be their last opportunity to pick up new species for their new book Reef Creatures Tropical Pacific. We’re happy to be reunited with our guide, Liberty, who has, over the past four years helped Ned find many new invertebrate species for the book. He has one of the best sets of eyes for finding cryptic little animals underwater we have ever encountered. He is not bad at finding large animals either. This afternoon, he spotted a Flamboyant Cuttlefish laying eggs inside a discarded tin.
Two years ago, we spent two weeks and many hours, sitting in one spot waiting for Flamboyant cuttlefish eggs to hatch so this is a nice addition to our photo collection.
March 20 – We made our first dive of the day at Nudi Retreat, a site where I have, in the past, seen a swarm of convict fish juveniles. No luck finding them today, but we did find a gorgonian just loaded with skeleton shrimp. These tiny crustaceans of the family Caprellidae, with their riotous behavior, are interesting enough to consume an entire dive. The females carry their eggs in an abdominal brood pouch and when the nearly microscopic babies hatch, they cling to their mother. To find them, I search the crowd for a fat, fuzzy shrimp then zoom in for the fun. Dr. Gustav Paulay said most are unidentified because they are highly endemic (I suppose because they don’t have a pelagic larval stage.) Mike Elliot has a hilarious video of skeleton shrimp called “Rasta Pasta”, available on DiveFilm’s HD podcasts (http://muckdiver.com/).
We’ve spent the last few days trading stories with the gang from Scuba Hut of Maryland. They are all making the transfer this afternoon over to Kima Bajo to spend a week diving the Manado side of North Sulawesi.
Scuba Hut of Maryland
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.
Juvenile Pinnate Batfish
Anna, was fast asleep when I slipped back into the room at eleven, probably dreaming of underwater wonders, or a new pair of shoes.
I spent the morning on the beach looking for sea beans. Confined to the surface by a head cold, I’m consoling myself by searching for treasures, drifted in from the sea. I try to collect some from every shore we visit and was not disappointed today. Johnny, one of the dive team, tells me the local name for the flat red seed is “batu panas.” “Hot rock?” I ask. He demonstrates by vigorously rubbing the seed on the dock and touching it to another guide’s arm. “Hot stone!” he laughs.
Feeling better just in time for the night dive, I joined the guys for the first dive at TK1, where I spent the first twenty minutes following a pair of hermit crabs, one in frantic pursuit of the other. Just as I was beginning to think I should have stayed with Ned and Liberty and hunted for shrimp, the lead crab stopped, extended her body way out of her shell and began flapping her legs. As I swung around to face her, I could see she had a clutch of gray eggs, and was fanning her abdomen to release her hatchlings. A minute into the effort, her partner shoved her away and before I could be too indignant about my ruined shot, a third crab appeared in my video screen and a lively battle ensued.
I’m still a bit confused about why the crabs were fighting over a female who was still carrying eggs, but it made for a very entertaining dive.
Bug on Leaf
We’ve had the pleasure of spending a few days with Garth and Rose McQuade, keen photographers from South Africa, who proved once again that good eyes for nature work above as well as below water. Garth pointed out this beautiful caterpillar, working its way around the dive center. Garth and Rose are members of the Gauteng Underwater Photographic Society who sponsor the underwater photo competition, the Sodwana Shootout (www.shootout.co.za).They’ve convinced us to move South Africa up on our must-do list.
Another night dive at Nudi Retreat, where Ned and Liberty are “red hot with shrimp” (my apologies to Charles Darwin for the play on words.) We did back-to-back night dives in pursuit of a neon orange hingebeak shrimp that remains elusive. They did find this beauty, that Ned has nicknamed the Liberty Bug.
Liberty Bug
I spent the dive studying hermit crabs. More on that tomorrow.
Kungkungan Bay Resort | fishid March 19, 2009 | 
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