^^ He does grab one’s attention, does he not?
They say that Bloody Bay got its name from a pirate battle that left the water running red. The story may be apocryphal, but Little Cayman has long been famous in diving circles for the underwater reef structure known as Bloody Bay Wall, a submerged mountain range that drops 6,000 feet to the seafloor.
It is a bit unusual for me to lead off with a shark: my camera is set up for macro, not wide-angle shots, but he was so pretty. With my camera setup, what I lack in lighting and lens has to be made up in proximity. Yeah, that means I have to get very, very close to pull off a decent shot. As he swam towards me, I whispered to myself, just a little bit closer, baby… which I realize makes me a weirdo.
We saw lots of turtles, including this Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata). These guys are critically endangered*, so I just hung about and let him come to me. Sort of like the shark, but less heart-pounding.
We saw lots of Yellowhead jawfish (Opistognathus aurifrons), who live in sandy holes on the seafloor. Super timid, they will zip back into their holes at the first sign of the paparazzi. In this species, the males incubate the eggs in their mouth, aerating them by popping the eggs in and out of their mouth.
Major bucket list shot for me to get the eggs. But that’s not the shot I got. This is the shot I got:
Nope, no eggs there. Empty gullet, all the way down to his stomach it seemed. Whilst hanging about the bottom looking for tiny things, I found a couple color variations of the Saddled blenny (Malacoctenus triangulatus).
The second one looks like he is sick and tired of me and my camera. His little face says it all.
And shrimp! This Pederson cleaner shrimp (Ancylomenes pedersoni) is so clear, you can see his stalky eyeballs sticking out the sides of his head. Something my own eyeballs cannot see, but luckily my camera has better eyeballs than I do. I feel I have used up my monthly allotment of the term eyeballs and will stop now.
Below, another bucket list item, which I include even though the image isn’t very good. This is known as a Spotless snapping shrimp (Alpheus immaculatus) not because he recently bathed, but because he lacks the gold spots of a very similar species, which is the only way to tell the two apart (unless you’re their mother, I suppose):
These guys hide in dark recesses amongst corkscrew anemones, and are difficult to coax into the light. If you piss them off, they punch at you with their itty-bitty claws, which sounds cute until you learn that some species of snapping shrimp are powerful enough to break a camera lens. Pro tip: don’t piss them off.
*Please, in the name of all that is sacred, reduce your use of plastic.
A few other favorites from this trip:
