Did 6 dives in the Destin area and 4 dives in the Pensicola (including the big "0") this last weekend. Where the week before was octopus, this weekend was frog fish and new species (well, to me anyway).
After seeing Hetland's fish pictures on the Big "O" of a bunch of species I don't have images of, I made plans for at trip there on Sunday, but before then, I did the typical Destin "reef" dive.
Vis on the surface sucked, but at the bottom it was at least 60 feet. There were nudibranch and frog fish everywhere...
Most of the time, people completely miss frog fish. Part of the reason is that they can contort themselves and color match almost anything:
Sometimes the colors are absolutely amazing:
Saw another spotted scorpion fish, only this one was a young one:
Now for the interesting stuff.
I came across what I thought at the time was a spotted eel...but it was not:
Near it was an anemone, that when I looked at the images later, had a bunch of anemone shimp on it... which I have never seen here. I went back the next day and got some images (misplaced my super macro lens, so had to make do with what I had).
To get a size perspective on these guys... here is an image with a peterson shrimp in it (about 1/2 inch long):
The shimp are in the far right of the image.
Here is what they look like:
If you compare to the images in the Reef Creature book, this is a close, but different species.
On the subject of shrimp, there were Peterson shrimp all over the place:
Next some general fish pictures:
After seeing Hetland's fish pictures on the Big "O" of a bunch of species I don't have images of, I made plans for at trip there on Sunday, but before then, I did the typical Destin "reef" dive.
Vis on the surface sucked, but at the bottom it was at least 60 feet. There were nudibranch and frog fish everywhere...
Most of the time, people completely miss frog fish. Part of the reason is that they can contort themselves and color match almost anything:
Sometimes the colors are absolutely amazing:
Saw another spotted scorpion fish, only this one was a young one:
Now for the interesting stuff.
I came across what I thought at the time was a spotted eel...but it was not:
Near it was an anemone, that when I looked at the images later, had a bunch of anemone shimp on it... which I have never seen here. I went back the next day and got some images (misplaced my super macro lens, so had to make do with what I had).
To get a size perspective on these guys... here is an image with a peterson shrimp in it (about 1/2 inch long):
The shimp are in the far right of the image.
Here is what they look like:
If you compare to the images in the Reef Creature book, this is a close, but different species.
On the subject of shrimp, there were Peterson shrimp all over the place:
Next some general fish pictures:
