Pontohi Pygmy Seahorses are one of the most beautiful critters we get in Lembeh. They are also one of the hardest to find and the hardest to get photos or video of.
These tiny pygmy seahorses usually live in fairly shallow water, around 3m to 10m in depth. They like to live on and around Halimeda algae, on the side of rocks, boulders or walls, where they can attach their tail and eat miniscule crustaceans that they share there habitat with. And it’s this that makes them so difficult to film once you’ve been lucky enough to find one.
As they are shallow and like areas with algae, sponges and soft coral, this means that there is a lot of water movement most of the time, especially surge. This is turn means that the Pontohi sways around, never staying still and when something is this small it makes it very difficult to keep in focus.
This Pontohi that I filmed was the one I had been searching for every since I knew of there existence., Everything was perfect. No current, it was in a little recess which, through an extremely lucky twist of fate, meant that I could only get a bit of my lights on it, which gives it this lovely feeling of being seen under a spotlight. It was filmed at around 9am, so not on a night dive. I was very lucky to get this footage and to be finally able to get some clear film of this wonderful creature.
