Babies – sea life
Don’t get all excited! It’s not children or infants. How do you know fish are small? They were very small. I know. But if you shoot them in scale they will be dots in your post. And if you shoot them close, they will look like mature adults. Pediatricians are very very fond to say kids are not miniature adults. And, you can readily tell, most of the time. There are exceptions in which adults dress and make up their kids to be glamour kids. Fascinating, but so weird. Hey! That’s a whole industry right there. But the crown of thorns and blue spotted ray are indeed juvenile. And they look like mature adults. So you have to trust me. As in, “Trust me, I’m a doctor.”
Crown of thorns, Regal angelfish
Here’s another find under the coral. The crown of thorns is largely an ugly scary looking thing. Occasionally it is a very nice subject for photography because it can be quite colorful. This one was deep in a coral crevice. And there was an angelfish lingering around it. That was the picture. This starfish eats and decimates the coral reef in some parts of the world. It’s very hard to kill. But you can kill it with cow bile. Bet you wanted to know that? And how did they discover that?
Crown of Thorns Starfish
This is a starfish that eats the reef and kills it. So it is destructive and should be killed on sight. You can’t cut it up. Each piece will generate a new starfish. It is colorful because strobe lighting will make it so.
Otherwise it is drab gray underwater. I dragged this guy out from under the coral and laid it over an outcropping. It then lazily unfolded and moved away. This is only the second time I have seen one in this area of the reef. So I guess most of the coral is still safe.
No, this is not the one I missed a few days back. These guys are hiding. They must know that there is a bounty on them.
How Did I Miss This
I swim and try to see the unusual. It’s worth a picture. And in fact I was thinking during this dive about the crown of thorn starfish. I saw some lionfish. I always stop to take a shot. There are thousands of shots of them in my collection. And I still take a few. And when I got to editing, well, right there, plain as day, is not one but probably two of the crown of thorns I had been thinking of. Go figure.
I wear glasses now. My kids tease me. I consider myself to be pretty observant. Oh well. Yes, had I seen them we would have played with the wildlife. Oh! An interesting fact, they are killed by injecting cow bile into them. How did someone come up with that as a solution?
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