Another wonderful week in Lembeh…Be sure to look at Barb’s fantastic Week 6 photos below..

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This week I’ll start with my best bit….I found a Blue Ring Octopus.

There are many amazing creatures and critters in Lembeh and our guests, of course, want to see as many as possible. We love finding Mimic and Wonderpus octopuses, Hairy, Warty, Painted and Giant Frogfish, Bargibanti’s and Pontohi Pygmy Seahorses, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, Ghost Pipefish and many others and there is a good chance you will see them all. There are a few tricky critters for us to find and one of the most elusive is the Blue Ring Octopus. They are tricky as they spend most of their lives under the rubble and coral and don’t venture into the open very much. We’ve have now been for 6 weeks, diving everyday, and there have only been two Blue Rings spotted and we weren’t on either of those dives. So there we were, diving at Batu Merah (Red Rock). It had been a great dive with two Giant Frogfish (one in a sponge), Pink Bargibanti’s Pygmy, Nudis, a Dragon Sea Moth and, at the end of the dive, we were having great fun watching some Pom Pom Crabs (Boxing Crabs).

These great tiny crabs which hold even tinier anemones in their pincers and wave them around. I decided to go and look for the Sea Moth again, as everyone else was watching the crab show. Of course I could not seem to find the Sea Moth anywhere and so was instead watching a big school of Rainbow Runners which decided to swim around me. I watched them for a while then had a half-hearted look for the Sea Moth again, when, out of the corner of my eye, in the rubble, I saw this very small octopus head moving around. I moved closer to get a better look and as I did it dawned on me that it was a Blue Ring!!! I think Jony, the guide, instantly knew that when I started banging my tank I had found something good. He was there like lightening. We spent a good 5 minutes or so with this beautiful octopus, took some lovely photos, ascended with even bigger grins on our faces than usual.

What was interesting about this one was that when I showed one of our really experienced Dive Guides, Ade, the photos he said he had never seen one with red eyes…..

Blue Ring facts. If you were ever silly enough to get bitten by one (you would really have to harass one) it’s venom (tetrodotoxin,^[3] a neurotoxin which is created by bacteria in the salivary glands of the octopus) paralyses your voluntary muscles, but doesn’t actually kill you. You can’t move any of your body and you stop breathing, but your heart keeps on going. If there is someone with you and they can give you mouth-to-mouth for 20 minutes or so, you will be fine. Yet another reason to never tease or bother animals when you are diving.

The rest of the weeks diving was fabulous too. We are seeing a lot of Seahorses, including Thorny, Pygmies and we’ve found a white and a black Pontohi Pygmy (well done Tamrin). The Mandarins have been performing extremely well, obviously enjoying their business. It’s been a good week for Frogfish, with plenty of sighting of Giants (one even free-swimming around), Warty’s, Hariy’s and Painted. We’ve seen some more Solar-Powered Nudis and well as a whole host of others. Joe found a beautiful Saron Shrimp and Ade found some Coleman and Tozeuma Shrimp. Jeff has been finding, as always, some really small stuff including a Bumble Bee Shrimp and a tiny Pipe Horse. We’ve had Flamboyants and on night dives we’ve been watching Bobtail Cuttlefish flick sand and small buts of rubble over themselves on night dives. We also saw a Cockatoo flounder and a Reptilian Snake Eel which is bright pink! One of my favorite sights this week was watching a family of three white Ornate Ghost Pipefish.

The House Reef still rocks. Our guests love diving it and so do we. There are now nine Pink (I call them Red) Pygmies on one Sea Fan. Four Yellow Pygmies next door to them. There have been close encounters with Banded Sea Kraits. I’m pretty sure I saw a medium sized Napoleon Wrasse. We still have at least five Ornate Ghost Pipefish, and one of them is pregnant, as you can see in Barb’s photos below.

This weeks short video is of Flamboyant Cuttlefish. These amazingly colorful cephalopods are masters of camouflage and blend perfectly into the sand and rubble. But when they are seen, they change into the most vivid purples, red, yellow colors, with waves of changing color behind their eyes. There muscles have been shown to contain a highly toxic compound that is yet to be identified. It has been shown that the toxin to be as lethal as that of a fellow cephalopod, the Blue-ringed octopus. Colorful critters underwater are always colorful for a reason….

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So thank you to all lovely guests from the States (again East and West Coast), Grenada (West Indies), the UK, Germany, Holland and Singapore. We had a great time

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Week Five!! Hard to believe we’ve already been here over a month. It’s very easy to forget about time here…

This week we’ve had another international mix, with guests from Germany, Singapore, the States (East Coast, West Coast and a few states in between), Italy, France and a group of doctors (some of them hyperbaric docs) from Australia and Sweden.

So the docs let me know the reason that we, as divers, like to pee soon after we’ve finished diving. It seems that normally, when we are standing or sitting, we have about 1 or 2 extra litres of blood in our lower legs. This is very useful if we suddenly need to run away from a sabre-toothed tiger. When we get into the water (and this applies to snorkeling too) the extra blood, due to the lack of gravity, now rises to our chest cavity. The extra fluid pressure on our heart causes a signal to be sent to our brains. Our brain then sends a signal to our kidneys that say ‘you have too much blood/water in your system’ so your kidneys then start to produce more urine. This makes you want to pee!! Simple and thank you to Dr Folke Lind for this fascinating information. There is an important lesson here. It can be very dangerous to drink too much water before diving (or snorkeling) as this can cause problems with your heart. And it is important to drink water after diving, as you now have less water in your blood and this can hamper the elimination of nitrogen.

So, back to the diving. Another great week. The most unusual sight this week goes to the massive Hawksbill turtle we can at Makawide 2…very funny to be looking at everyone looking at the turtle then looking at their macro lens… Jahir 1 remains productive with Tiger Shrimp, Hairy Frogfish, and Giant Frogfish. This week has also seen Pante Parigi with some very cool stuff, Flamboyant Cuttlefish and Wonderpus. Other lovely sightings have been Dragon Sea Moths, more Pontohi Pygmy Seahorses (absolutely tiny things, about half the size of a ‘normal’ pygmy seahorse), more Solar Powered Nudis, I saw my first Tozeuma Shrimp at Pinta Colada, a nearly invisible long decapod, Barb has been spotting weird and wonderful Sea Spiders at Nudi Retreat and we’ve been enjoying watching the tiny Boxing Crabs with their little anemones. Plus, of course, all the other nudis, octopus, crabs, shrimps and critters that grace us on every dive.

Barb has been spending time on the house reef. We now have 5 Ornate Ghost Pipefish, one with eggs, within about 5 meters of each other. There are Robust Ghost Pipefish, Liberty’s Pipefish is still there, the Pygmy’s, Pink and Yellow, are still at home on their fans. Barb’s favourite moment of the house reef this week was watching two fleshy hard corals having a territorial fight, with their polyps extending, one trying to eat the other!!! (you can click on a photo for a bigger image)

For me, I saw my favorite nudi again, called a Janolus. Amazing blue/purple colour, great shape and just beautiful. On the video below it is the first nudi on show. The video this week has some of the best nudis I’ve seen here so far.

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And so to my question of the week.. What is the following photo of? Any ideas…I promise you there is a critter there somewhere……leave a comment if you think you know…

Click the photos below for Barb’s Fab Week 5 Photos. It will open a slideshow in a new window….

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Another week slips by…I just love living close to the equator. The days just roll from one to another. I have never been someone who misses the temperate seasons. My friends always seem to think that it must be so hard for me to miss spring, summer, fall and winter and just be in eternal summer…it is not hard at all. All i remember in the UK was a five month winter when it was dark and miserable and everyone was unhappy. Then there was a two week spring when the trees blossomed (very pretty, but flowers are flowering all year here), then about four weeks of what was described as summer, which usually consisted of rain with two or three days (sometimes in a row) of summer and when the sun did shine the country stopped, no air-con anywhere..then fall (autumn) where the leaves fall of the trees which stops all the trains for running and it gets cold and dark and turns quickly into winter….

So back to lovely warm Kungkungan Bay. Another good international week with guests from Germany and Sweden and two big groups of divers from the States and Hong Kong and all of them here for the first time. I’ve noticed that diving in the Lembeh Strait for the first time tends to put rather big smiles on divers faces. There are just so many weird and wonderful critters so see…

This week has seen an excellent round up of creatures. Jahir has again be very productive, with a Giant Yellow Frogfish (huge, well over 30cms), Wonderpuses, Stargazer (well done Barb in spotting that), a pair of Tiger Shrimp, Hairy Frogfish, A Coleman Shrimp (excellent find by Jonny and Amba. Other sites have found Flamboyant Cuttlefish, Mimic Octopus, Halimeda Crabs, Ornate, Robust and Halimeda Ghost Pipefish, Orangutan Crabs, a truly beautiful Juvenile Batavia Spadefish (Batfish) a good find from Joe, a tiny and oh so beautiful Pontohi Pygmy Seahorse (great spot from Tamrin) and even a Hairy Octopus at Nudi Retreat 1, found by Jeff. All in all a great weeks diving, with everyone seeing the things they had come here to see. Once again Barb has taken some fabulous photos. Make sure you have a look..just click on the photos at the top and bottom of this blog..

My best spots of the week were finding a Phyllodesmium longicirrum on a night dive. A huge nudibranch that ingests the zooxanthellae which it feeds on and uses them in a symbiotic relationship to obtain nutrients via photosynthesis throughout it’s body…cool stuff…

and finding a tiny juvenile Fingered Dragonet jumping around on the sand..it was about one cm long. The shots of the nudi and Dragonet are frames taken from my video..

My most amusing dive this week was watching a little Wonderpus decide that to escape my attention he would build himself a little barricade of loose rubble and then hide behind it. It was fantastic being able to watch this amazing cephalopod going about his business on the reef. Watch the video below…to give you some perspective, the head of the wonderpus is abput 3cms long..

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Another week flies (or should that be ‘swims’?) by…

A great mix, again, of international guests. We’ve had more lovely Japanese underwater photographers, Germans, Brits, Americans, Turks and a great group of Russians.

Barb and I have had a couple more boxes ticked again. There has been some great diving around the sites, with a couple of real ‘hot spots’ at the moment. Jahir has been serving up several Hairy Frogfish, Thorny Seahorses,  my first Mimic Octopus (box ticked), Painted Frogfish, Tiger Shrimp, Flamboyant Cuttlefish among other critters and also the site Serena North has been excellent, where we have seen Frogfish, Boxer Crabs, Zebra Mantis Shrimp. baby Frogfish, many beautiful juvenile Barramundi Cod and, my favorite of the week and another box ticked, the Harlequin Shrimp.

Overall, again, the diving has been wonderful..more highlights have been the Bobbit Worm on a night dive and a Bamboo Shark at TK3.

So my favorite moment of the week, as I have already mentioned, seeing my first Harlequin Shrimp (Hymenocera elegans). These are amazing creatures and we have a little family of three at the dive site. Mum and Dad are about 2 inches/5cms long and junior is, I would guess, less than a centimeter. They live in a rubble and broken staghorn coral area, only 2 meters/6 feet deep. They consume starfish alive. Usually working in pairs, the harlequin will keep the starfish alive by feeding on it for about a week, starting on the starfish’s tube feet, until it is completely consumed. You can see the remains of starfish around the shrimp… They have the most wonderful movement, walking around as if tipsy and were a complete pleasure to watch. Below is a short bit of video of one staggering around.

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So finds of the week go to our guides Liberty and Jeff for the Boxer Crabs at Batu Merah and to our guides Risman,and Horin for the Harlequin Shrimp, with honorable mention for Tamrin who found the the baby Harlequin…well done guys!!

Our Weeks Critter Board ———————————–>

Barb has again taken some lovely photos this week. Click on the photos at the top or bottom of this blog to view them in a slideshow

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Another great week at KBR. The weather has been sunny, the water blue and the diving fabulous.

We have many great divers, again from all over the world. In the last week our guests have come from the USA, England, Hong Kong, Germany, Malaysia, Japan and Italy to enjoy the marvelous underwater world of Lembeh.

First the sad news…my regulator of the last 10 years finally gave up and died. It had been a true and trusted friend, sharing many great memories with me, but has now been relegated to a paper weight. As it is no longer manufactured, it was time for a new one. Luckily it’s fairly easy to get equipment here, so I’m now the proud owner of a Mikron reg. It’s very small, very light and hopefully we’ll have a long a happy future together.

The diving never disappoints. The House Reef has again been very productive. We still have the 8 Red Pygmy Sea Horses (PSH) and the 3 Yellow PSH, but we also discovered, on another sea fan, a ting baby and still brown PSH. The green Ornate Ghost Pipefish is still in resident, now joined close-by with a white Ornate, as are the many other critters, including the Smashing Mantis Shrimps, Xeno Shrimp and many Nudis. The BIG excitement in the last day has been the discovery of Liberty’s Pipefish, the species that Liberty, our own Dive Supervisor, found in Lembeh.

The boat dives have turned up trumps, as always. Sightings this week include several types of larger Seahorse, Cockatoo Waspfish, Spiny Devilfish, Devil Scorpionfish, Lacey Scorpionfish (Rhinopias aphanes), a rare yellow variation of the Shortfin Lionfish, Banded Sea Krait, Hairy Frogfish, Painted Frogfish, Fingered Dragonets, Dragon Sea Moth, Orangutan Crab, Spider Crabs Tiger Shrimp and even a Bearded Brotula that I found.

My favorite moment of the week?  We were diving at Aer Bajo, a lovely black sand diving site. We had had a great dive and were swimming around at about 6 meters when I saw a glass jam jar sitting on the sand. It looked like it had something in it, perhaps something rotting and white…when I got closer it moved!! What’s going on? Suddenly it was clear..a Coconut Octopus had decided that coconut homes were very old-fashioned  and had moved into an ultra-modern glass house, complete with 360 degree panoramic views. Below are some stills lifted form my Video Camera. (Barb’s

Below is the link for Barb’s Photos of the Week

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