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Erick Camargo

São Paulo
SP - Brasil

814 Mensagens

Publicado - 07/07/2009 : 3:42:15 PM

Não qualificado

Pessoal achei mais uma sequência de fotos realmente interessantes que retirei do site:

http://www.richard-seaman.com/Underwater/Philippines/Highlights/index.html

Coisa linda minha gente...uahuahuahua

UnderwaterHighlights of the Philippine Islands

In2006 I headed off to the Philippines with a Canon 5D SLR camera to replacethe G2 point and shoot camera I'd been using for underwater photography. First stop was the diving mecca at Alano beach on the island of Bohol and,a very short hop away, the very small island of Balicasag, which is a marinereserve. That's where I found these humpback batfishes, hoveringaround a cleaning station just off the edge of the dropoff.

Thisis the first time I've seen one of these shorthand shrimps, which livein anemones. They're so transparent that you can look rightthrough and see the markings on the bottom of its body and even see itsgut within the body.

shorthand shrimp (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

Anothershrimp living in an anemone, but this time with a crab for a companion. This is a "sexy shrimp", which earns its name by the way it characteristicallyholds its tail up in the air. The shrimp's friend, no doubtplatonic, is a harlequin crab and they're both living within a beaded anemone. Just as with clown fish, the two crustaceans are immune to the anemone'sstinging cells.

click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format

Aroyal angelfish together with friend. Sadly, these beautifulangelfish are frequently exported for the aquarium trade even though theyusually don't survive long in a tank.

Therealways one troublemaker in a crowd who wants to go in a different directionthan everyone else! These are striped eel catfish, the onlytype of catfish which lives on coral reefs. Babies like thesecongregate together in large groups, but the adults go their own separateways and can reach a length of 32 centimeters. They might seemharmless, but they actually have highly poisonous spines on their finswhich in rare cases have killed people.

Ifyou're from Down Under like me, then you'd call this a bluefin trevally, butelsewhere people call them bluefin jacks. They're a popular sportfish,and can reach a length of 120 centimeters and weigh well over 40 kilograms.

Up to now my trip was following the usual script, but at this point somethingunexpected happened - I decided to learn to scuba dive. I'vebeen doing underwaterphotography for over ten years, but always free diving with a weightbelt while holding my breath. However the big new camera mademe feel a little silly and so I did my PADI open-water certification andended up doing about 15 dives.
On one of the first dives I went back to Balicasag where we did a driftdive 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 amusedthat I swam against the current to get photos of a titan triggerfish whichmade three or four head-on attacks on me. They're the largesttriggerfish, and I knew that females can be very aggressive when they'reguarding their eggs, and can inflict a very nasty bite right through awetsuit with those large teeth, but I've seen plenty of potentially dangerouscritters underwater and I feel comfortable to approach them with what Ihope is an appropriate amount of respect. It's also a nicesecurity blanket to have a large camera to push them away with.

Therewere certainly plenty of other dangerous fish to see, like this scorpionfishwhich was looking suitably devilish. I've seen scorpionfishbefore, but never as many as I saw in the Philippines, and there were eventimes when I was too nervous to settle onto the bottom because there wereso many in a small area. I'm not sure exactly which speciesof scorpionfish this is, because to be certain you have to count the numberof spines in its pectoral fins, but it's the spines on its fins which containthe very strong poison they use for defense.

Lionfishare another family of fish with highly toxic spines, I'd seen plentyof them in Egypt, but nothing to compare with the number and varietyof species I saw in the Philippines, a definite benefit of scuba divingrather than free diving. This naughty spotfin lionfish washovering outside the home of a shrimp or goby at dusk, hoping to pick upa quick meal.

I've also seen plenty of different types of moray eel over the years, butthis is the first time that I've seen a fimbriated moray - for the uninitiatedor 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 fora photo, and as you can see it wasn't exactly enchanted by having me asa companion.

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

I saw some ribbon eels which were very dark colored and I assumed thatthey were a different species, but in fact there's only one species ofribbon moray - juveniles are completely black, males are dark with a yellowdorsal fin and females are a combination of yellow and blue, and are sometimesalmost 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 changesex and become females, like some species of parrotfish.

Tomy surprise, one thing I didn't see lots of was butterflyfish, which isa shame since they're such an attractive family. While freedivingI photographed many butterflyfishin Egypt and Australia,but I didn't get many in the Philippines. Of course there areexceptions - I got a few lousy photos of a pyramid butterflyfish and asunburst butterflyfish, two varieties I hadn't seen before, and this onenice photo of a longnose butterflyfish. This species is extraordinarilywidespread, it's found all the way from East Africa through the Indianand Pacific Ocean to the coast of South America, and it's even made itsway to isolated islands like Hawaii and the Galapagos.

Wrassesare another family with a lot of interesting and attractive members. This is one of the nicest, a yellowtail coris, which I've seen some yearsago in Hawaii. The light coloration, and many blue spots infront of the bright yellow tail suggest that this is a female.

yellowtail coris (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

I also had the great good fortune to photograph this baby yellowtail coris,which must have been only 2 or 3 centimeters long. As you cansee, the colors and patterns change significantly as the fish grow up. It was very difficult to photograph, swimming jerkily backwards and forwardsand never seeming to stop.

Thebright color of these juveniles advertize their services as cleaners, removingparasites and dead tissue from larger fishes. Once they getbigger they start eating smaller fishes, so it seems that they forget theirearlier helpfulness!

Theonly other fish which tried to take a chunk out of me in the Philippineswas this cheeklined wrasse - in fact, several different cheeklined wrasseswent 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 wellendowed with teeth and easily dissuaded by waving a camera strobe in theirdirection. This individual is far more vividly marked thanany of the other photos I've seen, but apparently they're able to changetheir color to some extent at will, and have even been seen blending inwith bottom foraging goatfishes, and then darting out from the school tocatch small, unwary fish.

Oxycheilinus digramma (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

Thiscoral trout is also more vividly colored than most. It's nota trout at all, but belongs to the grouper family, which has several colorfulmembers.

coral hind or coral trout (click here to open a new window with this photo in computer wallpaper format)

Likeother hawkfishes, coral hawkfish are small to medium size fish which sitaround waiting for something tasty to come along. The red spotson the tail and dorsal fin are nice, but the yellow tassels on the dorsalspines are just crazy!

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

Ofcourse not every fish gets a cute name, as these pink skunk clownfish willtell you. They got this name not because they smell bad, butbecause of the white stripe down their backs, which looks like the whitestripe on a skunk's back. The domestic arrangements here areequally unsuitable for the delicate ears of children: each anemonehouses a large female, a smaller male and several even smaller males whicharen't sexually active. If the female dies then the largestmale becomes a female and the next larger male becomes his partner ...or her partner... anyway, you get the idea! Thereligious right would have a fit!

Iwas photographing something on the seabed at Anilao when I noticed thiscuttlefish less than a meter away, making like a rock by bringing its eightarms 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 theirink was the source of the dye called sepia, hence the family name Sepiadariidae.

Thisis the same individual a few moments later. Cuttlefish andother cephalopods have up to 200 cells called chromatophores per squaremillimeter of skin surface, which they can use to change color nearly instantly,producing red, brown, yellow, black and a range of metallic blues, greens,golds and silvers. Ironically, cuttlefish have excellent eyesightexcept that they're color blind, so they're not good at matching the actualcolor of the background, but they're still so good at what they do thatif placed on a submerged chessboard, they assume a pattern of squares ontheir own body.

Inthe last 6 or 7 years my animal photography has taken a more nocturnalbent, both in forests and jungles on land, and underwater. It's a very unnerving thing when you first take the plunge at night, butit's well worth doing, since the wildlife you see at nighttime is oftenquite different than what you see during the day. I did myfirst underwater scuba dive at Alona beach off Panglao Island, then severalmore 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 resortlooked like a wasteground, with only a few anemones like this one providingany interest. Thankfully my daytime dives showed that the areaaround Anilao has large areas of very healthy reef.

Thingsdid improve somewhat on that first night dive when I came across this sub-adultmany-spotted sweetlips; it looks quite different from theadult many-spotted sweetlips I photographed on the Great Barrier Reefin Australia. This one is well on its way in the transformationfrom the juvenile coloration of white spots on a brown background to theadult coloration of brown spots on a white background.

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

Ifthe "house reef" at Anilao was disappointing, then what would you expectfor the nearby dive site called Basura, which in Spanish means "rubbishdump"? I dived on this site one night, and was very impressedby the number of creatures making their homes amongst the castaway trash. This banded pipefish was one of several spending the night near a discardedoil drum, and in that same little area there were also cleaner shrimps,a whole school of juvenile bannerfish, and several other species. Take a close look at the middle of the right-hand edge of this photo andyou'll see another small fish, and just a couple of centimeters away fromit a snail with antennae outstretched.

Anotherhighlight of the Basura dive was these two warty frogfishes. I've never seen frogfish before, but on this trip I also encountered alarge black frogfish in Bohol.

They hardly looklike 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 whichcome too close. They can even change their colors to matchtheir environment better.

To improve theirhunting odds, frogfish are equipped with a small lure which they twitchabove their mouth to entice their prey to come closer, which is why they'vealso been given the name "anglerfish". You can just make out thelure folded back between the eyes of the frogfish at the front of thisphoto. If the lure is lost then it can be regrown over thespace of a few months.

Frogfishes don'tjust eat small prey, their mouths and stomachs can expand to accomodatea meal larger than the size of their own body. They're alsocannibals, so other frogfish need to keep a cautious eye out for theirfriends! To avoid being eaten they can rapidly swallow lotsof water to swell their bodies up in exactly the same way as some pufferfishdo.

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