As the end gets closer, Lembeh is still astounding me. This week I did one of the most incredibly dives of my life.

The weather has been really calm so I thought it would be nice to go and do a dive at the far north end of Lembeh that I had only dome once before, along a wall called Jicoyance. While I was I discussing it with my guides, one of our new guides, Ungke, who worked at another resort previously, said why didn’t we go to a site called Dante’s Wall. It’s only a couple of minutes past Jicoyance, so that seem like a good idea, especially as none of my other guides had ever been there.

Then Ungke mentioned there was a cave there and then he said that it had ‘the fish that flashes’ inside. That got my attention! I asked him a little more about it as I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I knew vaguely about flashlight Fish but never suspected they existed in Lembeh. Wow, this was too good to be true.

So we went up to Dante’s Wall. The cave goes into the wall with the entrance around 10m (30ft) deep. It’s a really big cave, flat bottom and reaches about 20m (60ft) back. You can always see the entrance and we were, of course, equipped with torches.

So in we go. When the your lights are on there you cannot see the Flashlight Fish. We swam slowly to the back of the cave, settled down then turned our lights off. At first it is just pitch-black. All the flashlight Fish have been pushed right to the back of the cavern

After a few moments suddenly there starts one of the most beautiful and surreal shows I have every seen. Your eyes start to pick up little white lights in the distance, flashing on and off and swirling around as the fish move around in their school. Then they start to get closer and closer and you are surrounded my a natural light show as the large light organ under each eye can be turned on and off using a black membrane like an eyelid.

I was mesmerised and it was truly one of the most wonderful things I have seen anywhere.

I did manage to rouse myself and think about trying to take some video. I managed to capture some of the action, so please enjoy the clip. I turned my lights on right at the end, so you can get a glimpse of the fish.

This week we went to a dive site I had never been to before, in the south of Lembeh, on the mainland. It was very mucky but, as seems to be the case when going somewhere for the first time, very productive. Two Mimics, Ghost Pipefish, Pipehorses and then Ade (my wonderful trusty Dive Supervisor) came over to me and started making the sign for an octopus and then the ‘pregnant/eggs’ sign. ‘OK’, I thought, ‘I’ve seen octopus eggs before’ so I slowly made my way over.

I did not expect to see tiny little octopus squirting out from beneath the Coconut Octopus arms!! Wow!!! I couldn’t believe it and silently offered my thanks to the Lembeh Diving God…

It was an amazing sight to watch. Tiny little babies were rising up in little swarms at times, escaping through her arms and she also was firing them out of her funnel (the tube that octopus can jet themselves through the water with, or squirt their ink). The eggs ribbons seem to contain eggs at different stages of development, from not really ready to ‘here I come!’. She also would check the eggs with the suckers on her arms, individually, as if looking for the ones that were ready to hatch.

It was another bit of behaviour that I felt privileged to watch, another amazing moment from Lembeh, and another dive I will never forget.

I’ve seen many strange things, weird behaviour and odd critters while in Lembeh, but this is one of the most bizarre sights I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing…

Now I’ve seen Carry Crabs carrying Urchins, Jellyfish, banana skins, pieces of cardboard and crinoids….I’ve seen shrimp and even fish on nudibranchs…but what I had never seen and, to be honest, never expected to see, was a nudibranch on a crab!

What started out as ‘hey, look, there’s a big nudi on the sand…it’s not moving much…’ turned into ‘Holy Cow!!! That Carry Crab got hold of a Nudi!!!’

Carry Crabs usually hold on to an Urchin (if they are an Urchin Carry Crab) or an Upside-down Jellyfish (if they are a Jelly Carry Crab). They have an adapted back pair of legs that can hold onto their ‘hat’ which stops the urchin or jelly from moving away. The crab can then bury itself in the sand, leaving the unappetising urchin/jelly on the surface and thereby protecting itself.

I had never heard of a crab grabbing a nudi and wouldn’t have believed it unless I had seen it for myself..so enjoy this very rare sight…

The relationship between these ‘Shrimp Goby’ and their ‘Shrimp’ reminds me of the expression ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’

The Goby has pretty good eyesight and lives on sand. The trouble with living on sand is that there is nowhere to hide when something comes to eat you.

The Shrimp has pretty bad eyesight and lives on sand. The trouble with this is that you cannot see the predator that is about to eat you.

So these two very different creatures have formed a very clever relationship. The Shrimp is very good at digging and digs extensive tunnels under the sand. The tunnels, due to the nature of the shifting sands, are always collapsing and in constant need of repair. When excavating and repairing the tunnels, the shrimp have to push the debris out of their tunnel. At this point they are very vulnerable to predators.

The Goby, which cannot dig, acts as a lookout, with it good eyesight. It sits just outside the entrance to the tunnel and keeps a sharp eye out. When it sees anything approach, it wiggles it’s body and shoots back into the tunnel.

The shrimp, if you look at the video, when it’s out of the tunnel, always keeps one of its antennae on the body of the goby. This way it can tell if there is danger nearby, as it can feel the goby twitch and then it too can rapidly disappear into the safety of it’s tunnel.

It is rather hard to film these guys, as my camera has to be pretty close to the action, and usually the Shrimp Goby senses danger and goodbye goby and shrimp. By remaining very still for a long time and finding the idiot goby, I managed to finally get some good footage.

The shrimps are amazingly good at digging and moving small rocks around, while all the time keeping one antenna on the goby.

And so back to my first sentence…how did this relationship start. Nature is a wonderful thing indeed. This relationship is called Mutualism, which is where different species both benefit from their relationship with each other.

Another week and another Lembeh surprise. I found a White Spearing Mantis!

We get quite a lot of mantis shrimp in Lembeh, both the smashing mantis and the spearing mantis. Smashing Mantis have round eyes and (as the name suggests) smash their prey. Spearing Mantis have oval jellybean-like eyes and they spear their prey.

The most common mantis we get are the Peacock Mantis, the Tiger Mantis and the Golden Mantis. There are also many other types.

What I didn’t know is that we also get a White Mantis. This is an un-described mantis that is only known from Indonesia and was completely unknown to me until I found this one!

It was rather conspicuous, in it’s borrow, bright white in a sea of black sand. And it wasn’t a small mantis, probably about 15cm (6”) long. It seemed fairly unconcerned by me and allow me to get some nice close-ups of a very unusual critter. I particularly like the close-ups of it’s eye, where you can actually see the multiple lenses that cover the eye.

Even though Lembeh is all about small things, some things are smaller than others. And they don’t come much smaller (or harder to film) than Idiomysis.

These are a tiny little crustacean that seem to hover around like flies. They are only a few millimeters long and are always in constant motion. This makes it very difficult to photograph or film them.

It has been a pet project of mine, over the last year or so, to try and get video of them, using my woefully inadequate equipment. My idea is simple…use the slow motion feature to capture these creatures, so you can actually see them. The trouble is twofold. One: The depth of field is very very small, and it’s impossible to re-focus, either manually or automatically, at these distances and speed that the Idiomysis move. Two: When I hit the ‘slow motion’ function on my camcorder, it goes into a three second 240fps auto mode. you hit it and it immediately takes the 3 second shot, with no control, no re-focusing…

So for a shot of these Idiomysis to come out I need the tiny little thing to just move up and down while it happens to be in focus, and not to move back or forth away to towards the camera. Believe me , this is not something that happens very much…

But finally, today, I think I have enough to present the world’s first macro slow motion (nearly all in focus) video of these creatures. They are fascinating little things, and have wonderful eyes, bodies and it is really cool to finally be able to see one.

Ever since I first saw one of these, in the Caribbean, 15 years ago, i have wanted to see one closely.

They look like fish scales and you see them in the water column. They are tiny, about 5mm long. It takes a while to realise that they are not fish scales, but are in fact tiny creatures. I think I remember someone saying they were octopods (?) but cannot find anything about them.

We get them a lot in Lembeh. They are visible one second, as they reflect light, giving them their distinctive metallic blue colour, then they disappear. Just when I get in focus range, they always swim away, with a flick of their tails, Very frustrating.

This week I finally found a dead one! It caught my eye, as it had become attached to a tendril of something on the bottom. Finally i could see and film it’s body. even when dead it still has this amazing reflective capability, almost ghost-like.

If you look very closely at the footage, especially when it disappears, you can see it’s tiny legs and body.

I hope this will interest others like me, who have always wondered what it is.

Something strange caught my eye on a dive the other day. I was swimming along, looking for the usual Lembeh suspects when, in the corner of my vision, I saw a small white shape moving erratically through the water.

I snapped my head around and saw a sight that I had never seen before…

We see a lot of underwater snails and conchs here. And whenever we’ve seen them moving they have always been slowly pulling themselves along. They do this with their ‘foot’. The ‘foot’ is the bottom part of their body and is attached to their ‘mantle’ which can completely envelop their shell. They usually push their foot out in front, under their body, then slowly drag themselves toward to foot, It’s a slow process!

However this one seems to use it’s foot and mantle to ‘fly’ through the water. It turns it’s body upside down then uses it’s foot/mantle as a big paddle to propel itself forward. I kept thinking of Dumbo, which is why I’ve called it that. Eventually, when it reached a suitable bit of sand, it buried itself and was gone.

I asked our guides and none of them had ever seen this movement before.

Bargibanti Pygmy Seahorses are one of the critters that helped put Lembeh on the map. Lembeh was one of the first locations where you could be guaranteed to see them and they have rightly become one of the most iconic macro critters.

But they are also one of the most difficult critters to get either good photos or video, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s much more difficult to get good video. There are several reason that make them such a tricky subject:

1. They are very small!
2. The live on sea fans, usually towards the edges, which means they are very tricky when it comes to holding your camera steady
3. Seafans like current, so that means the seafan is usually moving around
4. They are seahorses, and that means they like turning away from your lens.

Now this little guy had been on the same seafan for at least that last two years. I visit him whenever I can. On a visit this week several things came together…they was no current, he was at the bottom of the seafan and he didn’t keep on turning away. All this made it possible to get some good video.

And while I was filming him, I kept getting this song playing through my head…as he’s always been on the same seafan, without a partner, I kept hearing the Chipmunk song in my head… ‘I’m so lonely, so lonely…’ and I couldn’t resist putting that music to this clip….

So enjoy some rare extreme close up of one of the most beautiful critters in the ocean.

Flamboyant Cuttlefish are one of the most wonderful creatures we get in Lembeh. They are small (of course) but have the ability to flash bright colours when excited.

They are also amazing to watch feed, as they crawl around, searching for small prey. When you watch them it looks like they extend a tube which they fire at their prey and then suck it into their mouths. Anyway, that’s what it looks like…..

However what is really happening is that they have two adapted feeding arms. They put these two arms together then slowly extend them. When they are near their prey they make a lighting fast strike, grab the bit of poor unsuspecting food and gobble it up.

I was extremely lucky to get a couple of bits of action. This clip starts off with a normal speed strike. After that I managed to get in front of a Flamboyant and film the two feeding arms coming together and stretching out. The next sequence is of the strike in slow motion. When slowed down you can actually see that the ‘tube’ is made of two arms that grab the small scorpionfish and drag it into it’s mouth. Enjoy!!