Endemic Hawaiian Longnose Butterfly Fish... They're not just yellow, there's a black phase too...

Longnose butterflyfish from Kona Hawaii from Steve on Vimeo.

Here's a short clip of Hawaii's endemic version of the Longnose Butterflyfish. They're real unusual in that they have a black phase (this one was especially black, lots of time you can see some yellow mixed in). I'm not sure that anyone's actually figured out why they'll sometimes turn black. We see the black phase in Kona on a fairly regular basis, but they're uncommon on the other islands from what I understand.

Tonight we're doing the manta night dive again. Most of the last couple of months we've been making the trip down to the Sheraton for the manta dive, the mantas kind of scadoodled from Garden Eel Cove when the surf came up and the plankton level dropped for some reason. I suspect they don't care to eat a lot of sand that gets kicked up by heavy surf - that's as good a theory to make up as any, so I'm sticking with it. We've had a week and a half or two without major northwest swells and apparently they're back again... 10 last night... Yahooo!!!!! Most of the dive operators really prefer to do the manta dive at Garden Eel Cove off the airport, it generally has better water conditions, larger numbers of mantas, and is a great night dive to boot in comparison to the Sheraton site. We'll be happy to do the dive there again.

later,

Steve