Camouflage

As the Belle, the Beauty falls in love with the Beast, Heidi Klum was to Seal, Heather Locklear was to David Spade, well, you get the idea. The point is, that these unlikely pairings of beauty and maybe not so beautiful at first glance, brings to mind the saying that beauty is only skin deep. At one's first glance of the Commerson's Frogfish, they appear to be an aberration of God, a mistake, an ugly mistake of God. However when you come to know these creatures and learn a bit about them, you take a liking to and even gain extreme appreciation for their existence. Don't get me wrong, I dig Seal's music, David Spade is always good for a chuckle, and Beauty and the Beast, well, that story just goes along with my point. Which is that underneath it all there is beauty, to someone. 
We dove Mala Ramp today! This is my favorite place to dive on Maui. It was my first dive I took when I moved here, and it caught my heart with it's amazing beauty. Having my son Jaron here for the summer has afforded a dive buddy and more opportunities to dive on my days off. Also along for the dive were some friends of mine. Uncle Mike came out to dive with us this morning. This was a rare treat, because Uncle dives every day for work and it is hard to get up and go dive when you get a rare day off during the busy summer season for our shop. So much mahalos to uncle! Also along for the ride, and the reason we drove over to Lahaina on our day off to go explore this outstanding dive site, was Emily, a research diver that is working on her PhD. Emily doesn't get much free time to dive for fun, due to her busy research schedule, and it was her last day on island for a while. She really wanted to dive Mala Ramp, so we decided to help her, and ourselves to a relaxing, non working dive. Also along on the trip was Mark, a dive instructor who used to dive for the shop, helps Emily out with her research when she is on island.

I have titled this blog Camouflage, and as you look through the pictures they will show you why. First up we had Uncle find the elusive Frog Fish for our photographic opportunity. These fish are one of my favorite to find and to the untrained eye, very hard to find on the reef. I can not take credit for finding these particular froggies. Uncle knows right where these fellows hang out so he can find them a lot more often than I ever could. He found TWO specimens on this dive, both in the same spot, a rare treat. The first is one is yellow and looks a lot like a particular coral that is common here, but this fellow wasn't too difficult to spot. In that picture, you can see his eyes and mouth that distinguish him from the corals on which he is typically hiding. It took me a couple of head shakes to re-focus and find this fellow to shoot him. Kind of embarrassing really, but I wasn't up close when Uncle pointed him out. He then held up two fingers, signaling us that there were two! So it comes my turn to get in to get some shots, and I am there just looking at this area, I see nothing! Finally I was able to see this big yellow fellow! I was getting close to take the shot and then finally out of the corner of my eye caught This orange fellow sitting right there next to my hand as I was looking for a place to grip.
In this picture that I got of him, you can barely make out that this is a fish at all. He really looks like an orange sponge. If you look closely at this shot you can make out part of a fin on the top left of this orange blob. Take a minute to look at it, I will wait. Tough one eh? So yeah! We saw two frog fish in the same spot, just chilling out, waiting for their next meal to come along. These are in the angler fish family, and have a small "lure" on the top of their foreheads that they dangle to attract smaller fish for dinner, lunch, or even an mid day snack. With one big gulp they swallow their prey whole, and both of these appeared to be quite adept at their fishing skills!
From here we continued the journey onward, and several turtles decided to come and hang out with us. I have so many turtle pictures that I took, as one in particular was very curious and even stopped to pose for several minutes with us. Uncle calls this fella "Money" as he is usually very cooperative with us so we can get shots of divers with turtles and make a little beer money on the side!

The turtles are great, but no pictures for this blog. Perhaps I will do a turtle blog, but for now I will continue on with one more camouflage animal that I was able to discover under a chunk of this collapsed concrete pier. The reef sharks tend to hang out under these ledges and swim through areas and as I was under one maneuvering for a shot I noticed this fellow hanging out in a corner. Do you see him? Looks just like a chunk of rock or cement with different sponges growing on it. Now look at this next picture and you can see some of it's legs protruding out from underneath. This is a sponge crab. These things are so fun to watch when they are cruising around at night hunting for their dinner. These crabs get big and they have modified pincers that they use to impale pieces of sponge or really anything that they can attach for camouflaging themselves.
A very interesting creature indeed, inedible however, so no I didn't have myself a nice crab dinner!
So there you have it! One of my favorite things to do during a dive is attempt to find the elusive and hard to find creatures that exist. It makes diving a lot of fun for me. Now I realize that sharks are not masters of camouflage, but shark week is coming so since this dive site is one we call our shark dive, I thought I could end this adventure by posting a couple of pictures of the reef sharks that were out during the dive. This big fellow came pretty close a couple of times and I was feeling my heart race just a bit as he would look at me then sharply turn away. Just to make it even more intriguing and heart racing, there were two of these amazing creatures just cruising back and forth between the parts of the pier giving us several photo op's that I go looking for on a dive!