Q IS FOR QUEER UNDERWATER CREATURES : A-Z Challenge

Welcome to Day 17 of the A-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is:

'Wildlife Encounters'

One of the prime areas to find seriously queer or weird creatures is the Lembeh Strait in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. I have had articles published about this location in Australia’s Sport Diving Magazine and in a newspaper in Spain. Here are a few random extracts from these publications in no particular order:

I was finning slow and low over the black sand.

A flash of electric blue caught my attention. I had been about to swim directly over a blue ring octopus. 

I was far too excited by the sighting to consider the implications of my near collision with one of the most dangerous animals in our oceans.

Pfeffer's flamboyant cuttlefish pulsed yellow and purple when we approached. Longhorn cowfish and helmut gurnards skimmed fast and low.

Frogfish - or anglerfish - in an unlikely range of colours remained motionless no matter how closely we approached; stoical and somehow dignified despite their absurdly comical appearance.  

Hairy Frogfish

I fell for the hairy version big-time. Of course it's not hair at all but skin filaments.  Nevertheless the hairy frogfish looks cute and cuddly enough to pet.

Lethally camouflaged dragonets, waspfish, scorpionfish and lionfish required constant vigilance as we homed in on likely spots in our search for critters. 

Snake eels hole-up in the sand with just their heads protruding. As we were photographing one a ghostly spaghetti-like tentacle emerged from the sand.  It quested blindly for a few seconds before vanishing again.  Never has the underwater world felt as alien as it did for those few eerie moments.

As a dive destination, North Sulawesi is a great place to find unusual, rare and beautiful animals (or queer underwater creatures, if you will).

See you tomorrow - I'll be heading west. Can you guess where and what the next animal will be?



If you want to blog-hop to the next A-Z Challenge blog, please click HERE

ON THE ROAD SURPRISES - Part 4 - Going Underwater

Scuba diving is unpredictable and always full of surprises which is what keeps me going back for more. I’m off to the Maldives next week for a diving trip, so I’m going to leave you with some underwater surprises and I’ll see you when I return at the end of March.

The first time I bumped into a Decorator crab I didn't realise what I was looking at. We were diving the Lembeh Strait in North Sulawesi and I saw a sea urchin moving impossibly quickly on the sand. It was only when I swam closer that I realised the urchin was perched on a crab. 




These crabs have spikes on their eco-skeletons which enable them to attach sponges, seaweeds, algae - and in the case of the crabs I saw in Lembeh - sea urchins, onto their backs as a form of disguise. I've even seen a decorator crab with an unwieldy mess of dead coral on its back, but alas I haven't been able to unearth that particular photo from my files.

I think there's something rather endearing about these little critters and I'm looking forward to a wealth of diving surprises in the Maldives next week.



As a result of a question put to me (see the comments) I did further research and discovered that my 'decorator crabs' are in fact 'urchin crabs' which resemble decorator crabs. The big difference being: urchin crabs carry sea urchins and decorator crabs carry sponges, hydroids, bits of algae and other inert objects on their shells. 

This is a classic case of believing what a dive leader told me without thoroughly checking the facts - so slapped wrist to me - and big thanks to AW for asking the questions that prompted my research.

In answer to AW's question about the advantages: the sea urchins benefit from being carted around by the crabs because they are transported to new feeding grounds.