Yesterday Madam J and I borrowed a dingy and explored the Creole Rock area on scuba for about 75 minutes. I took the 85mm macro lens that she gave me for Christmas, so this was my first proper underwater test of the lens.

Although the visibility was not great, the lens was quite good for capturing shots of small fishes and crustaceans. One interesting thing we found was a bed of sergeant major (Abudefduf saxatilis) eggs. Approximately one square foot of eggs was laid on the surface of a large rock. The eggs being about the size of sturgeon caviar, it was not surprising to learn that female sergeant majors may lay as many as 20,000 eggs.

The bright red bigeyes (Priacanthus arenatus) made good subjects, as they seemed uninterested in the photographer. Another interesting sight was a hamlet (Genus Hypolectrus) that has some features of both the yellowbelly (Hypoplectrus aberrans) and barred (Hypolectrus puella) hamlets. Other fishes encountered included juvenile slippery dick (Halichoeres bivattus), blackear wrasse (Halichoeres poeyi), juvenile french angelfish (Pomacanthus paru), orangespotted filefish (Cantherhines pullus), bluestripe grunt (Haemulon sciurus), peacock flounder (Bothus lunatus) and sand diver (Synodus intermedius).

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 9:21 am and is filed under Diving, Explorations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.