It's that time of year again... summer's over, crowds are down, water's warm and flat. We always look forward to September through November as it's probably the nicest water conditions of the year - not that they're bad at other times - it's just consistantly good for the most part.
We've had some really good diving lately. Been seeing lots of critters. Highlights of the last week or so have been frogfish, scorpion fish, flame angels, psychedelic wrasses, flame wrasses, a HAMMERHEAD!, leaf scorpions, and more. The manta ray night dive has been crazy busy, with both boats and mantas. We've been going out 2-3 night a week (a lot for us, we've only got 3 people to cover 7 days and 3 nights of diving) on top of the daily morning dives. Manta numbers have been in the teens the last couple weeks pretty much every night. The boat numbers on that dive are starting to shrink now that school's starting everywhere and tourist numbers are dropping.
Here's a nice frogfish that we've been watching grow. It's in the 5-6 inch length right now, was much smaller when Cathy found it earlier this summer. It's amazing how fast they grow. It's pretty "clean" and yellow right now. As they grow it'll get all sorts of red stuff growing on it (you can see it starting in spots) and start changing colors.
Later,
Steve
3 comments:
Does the red stuff grow on them or are they just changing colors to a different color phase?
Is that a real fish ???oh my God its my first time to see this kind of species.Must shared this to my friends,Thanks for posting and happy diving!
Hi Bob,
I think the answer is "Yes". This is the size that they typically start changing body color at, and if you look at the red it's developing, it appears to be growing on the fish. Hopefully it sticks in the same spot for a few months and I can continue to get shots of it as it changes. Cathy's been watching one nearby change over the last two months, it really changed over the last two weeks to the point where it moved 30 feet and she really had a tough time finding it, saw it, turned to show her divers and lost it again, took another minute to find.... really blends in now.
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