Thursday, May 10, 2007

Leaf Scorpionfish Taenianotus triacanthus


This is a picture of a face of a Leaf Scorpion. You kind of have to look at it twice to see it. I do have some very nice pictures of leaf scorpions a year or more back in the blog if you care to explore the archives (linked on the right side of the page if you are on the home page). Leaf scorpions spend most of their lives just sitting around gently waving with the currents, pretty much looking like a leaf, 'til something edible happens by, then it's a matter of a very quick distending of the jaw and they've had their meal and they go back to just sitting there. These fish seem to be very attracted to antler corals, placing themselves in or under the corals, so you'll often notice the divemasters checking out every antler coral they come across for this critter and a few other things.

Tuesday's night dive turned into a non-happening. My group was all snorkelers but one and when they called on Monday I'd filled them in on the relative lack of mantas and they decided to do other things (if I have a group of snorkelers, I really try to give them the option of not going out if it's likely they'll see nothing), the one diver in the group did join us for the morning dive. We had a couple of real nice dives in the morning, and as luck would have it, it was a good thing for the snorkelers that they decided not to do the night dive - no mantas. Last year this time we were in the front end of a 5-6 month stretch where we had mantas most every night... haven't been that lucky yet this year but I suspect it'll kick in at some point.

I finally sent out my fist e-mail "newsletter" today. I set up for it a long time ago and just never sent one out, figured I need to get started sooneer or later and now is a good time what with summer coming up. I'm not going to send them out too often, maybe quarterly or when something relatively big for the business occurs. If you'd like to get on the list, there's a link on the right side of the blog. Regular readers will get a lot more news from the blog than the e-mails.

That's about it for now.

Aloha,

Steve

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