Underwater Highlights of the Philippine Islands

This is the first time I've seen one of these shorthand shrimps, which live in anemones.   They're so transparent that you can look right through and see the markings on the bottom of its body and even see its gut within the body.

There always one troublemaker in a crowd who wants to go in a different direction than everyone else!   These are striped eel catfish, the only type of catfish which lives on coral reefs.   Babies like these congregate together in large groups, but the adults go their own separate ways and can reach a length of 32 centimeters.   They might seem harmless, but they actually have highly poisonous spines on their fins which in rare cases have killed people.

Up to now my trip was following the usual script, but at this point something unexpected happened - I decided to learn to scuba dive.   I've been doing underwater photography for over ten years, but always free diving with a weight belt while holding my breath.   However the big new camera made me feel a little silly and so I did my PADI open-water certification and ended up doing about 15 dives.

On one of the first dives I went back to Balicasag where we did a drift dive along the side of the island where there's a strong current.   The divemaster later told me that she was a little shocked and then amused that I swam against the current to get photos of a titan triggerfish which made three or four head-on attacks on me.   They're the largest triggerfish, and I knew that females can be very aggressive when they're guarding their eggs, and can inflict a very nasty bite right through a wetsuit with those large teeth, but I've seen plenty of potentially dangerous critters underwater and I feel comfortable to approach them with what I hope is an appropriate amount of respect.   It's also a nice security blanket to have a large camera to push them away with.

Lionfish are another family of fish with highly toxic spines, I'd seen plenty of them in Egypt, but nothing to compare with the number and variety of species I saw in the Philippines, a definite benefit of scuba diving rather than free diving.   This naughty spotfin lionfish was hovering outside the home of a shrimp or goby at dusk, hoping to pick up a quick meal.

I've also seen plenty of different types of moray eel over the years, but this is the first time that I've seen a fimbriated moray - for the uninitiated or those whose Latin isn't too good, "fimbriated" means "fringed".   So why couldn't they just call it a fringed moray eel?!

I swam around with it for several minutes to try to get good angles for a photo, and as you can see it wasn't exactly enchanted by having me as a companion.

This strange looking creature is a ribbon eel, which to my surprise is also a type of moray, but of the most harmless kind, constantly waving around in the water with its mouth open, waiting for very small fish to come within striking distance.

I saw some ribbon eels which were very dark colored and I assumed that they were a different species, but in fact there's only one species of ribbon moray - juveniles are completely black, males are dark with a yellow dorsal fin and females are a combination of yellow and blue, and are sometimes almost entirely yellow.

This species is the only type of moray eel which can change color and sex, they're classed as hermaphrodites since fully functional males can change sex and become females, like some species of parrotfish.

To my surprise, one thing I didn't see lots of was butterflyfish, which is a shame since they're such an attractive family.   While freediving I photographed many butterflyfish in Egypt and Australia, but I didn't get many in the Philippines.   Of course there are exceptions - I got a few lousy photos of a pyramid butterflyfish and a sunburst butterflyfish, two varieties I hadn't seen before, and this one nice photo of a longnose butterflyfish.   This species is extraordinarily widespread, it's found all the way from East Africa through the Indian and Pacific Ocean to the coast of South America, and it's even made its way to isolated islands like Hawaii and the Galapagos.

The only other fish which tried to take a chunk out of me in the Philippines was this cheeklined wrasse - in fact, several different cheeklined wrasses went after me while I was diving in Anilao, a short distance south of Manila.   Thankfully they're quite a bit smaller than titan triggerfish, less well endowed with teeth and easily dissuaded by waving a camera strobe in their direction.   This individual is far more vividly marked than any of the other photos I've seen, but apparently they're able to change their color to some extent at will, and have even been seen blending in with bottom foraging goatfishes, and then darting out from the school to catch small, unwary fish.

This coral trout is also more vividly colored than most.   It's not a trout at all, but belongs to the grouper family, which has several colorful members.

The prize for cute fish has to go to the clownfish and anemonefish, two families which have a very similar appearance and a very similar lifestyle, gaining protection from predators by swimming amongst the stinging arms of anemones.   These clown anemonefishes are almost identical to the anemonefishes used as a model for the movie Finding Nemo, though somehow that movie forgot to mention that they're protoandrous hermaphrodites like the ribbon eels above, with males turning into females in cases where the female dies - which means that Nemo's father should have become Nemo's mother!

I was photographing something on the seabed at Anilao when I noticed this cuttlefish less than a meter away, making like a rock by bringing its eight arms and two tentacles in close to its body and taking on a dark color.   Cuttlefish are the source of the cuttlebone given to caged birds, and their ink was the source of the dye called sepia, hence the family name Sepiadariidae.

In the last 6 or 7 years my animal photography has taken a more nocturnal bent, both in forests and jungles on land, and underwater.   It's a very unnerving thing when you first take the plunge at night, but it's well worth doing, since the wildlife you see at nighttime is often quite different than what you see during the day.   I did my first underwater scuba dive at Alona beach off Panglao Island, then several more at Anilao - in fact the first dive I did at Anilao was a night dive.   It was rather a depressing experience, since the "house reef" off the resort looked like a wasteground, with only a few anemones like this one providing any interest.   Thankfully my daytime dives showed that the area around Anilao has large areas of very healthy reef.

Here's one thing you'll never see in the daytime, a male yellowfin parrotfish asleep within a protective mucus bag.   It's thought that this bag might hide the scent of the fish from predators like moray eels roaming the reef at night.   Parrotfish create a lot of the sand in tropical areas by crunching away the coral with their beaks - a large specimen can create a hundred kilograms or more each year.

These two warty frogfishes were another highlight of the Basura dive.   I've never seen frogfish before, but on this trip I also encountered a large black frogfish in Bohol.

They hardly look like fish at all with their strange shape, foot-like fins and warty skin.   They lie in wait pretending to be sponges and then pounce on any fish which come too close.   They can even change their colors to match their environment better.

To improve their hunting odds, frogfish are equipped with a small lure which they twitch above their mouth to entice their prey to come closer, which is why they've also been given the name "anglerfish".  You can just make out the lure folded back between the eyes of the frogfish at the front of this photo.   If the lure is lost then it can be regrown over the space of a few months.

Frogfishes don't just eat small prey, their mouths and stomachs can expand to accomodate a meal larger than the size of their own body.   They're also cannibals, so other frogfish need to keep a cautious eye out for their friends!   To avoid being eaten they can rapidly swallow lots of water to swell their bodies up in exactly the same way as some pufferfish do.

I started my trip free diving, and that's the way I ended it, swimming with the whale sharks at Donsol, about 12 hours drive east of Manila.   Donsol is one of only two places in the world where whale sharks can reliably be encountered, the other being Ningaloo Reef off the western coast of Australia.   This opportunity was the main reason I decided to travel to the Philippines, rather than somewhere else.  I was in Donsol for two days and saw 5 or 6 sharks each day, even though the weather was cloudy, making it difficult to spot the dark shape of the shark swimming just below the surface.   The visibility at Donsol is much lower than at Ningaloo, but the prices are much cheaper and it's still a real thrill to get this close to such an extraordinary animal.