🐟 A moray eel opening and closing its jaws over and over looks like a warning. It isn't — morays have no bony gill covers, so every gape is a pump pushing water across the gills.
Tobia Kebir, Egyptian Red Sea, with two bluestreak cleaner wrasse working the same head.
#moray #redsea #scubadiving #marinebiology #egypt
🧡 The orange rosette on this sea slug's back is not a flower — it is the gill it breathes through. Nudibranch means "naked gill", and here is exactly why.
One slug, one coral head, house reef.
#nudibranch #seaslug #scubadiving #reeflife #macro
🐠 Watch what a scrawled filefish does with its tail — it keeps the whole fan furled shut while it cruises, like an umbrella nobody has opened yet.
Gamul Soraya, Safaga. Red Sea, June.
#redsea #filefish #scubadiving #oceanlife #reef
🪸 Purple soft corals, a burnt-orange sponge and an orange snowstorm of anthias over the top of it all. This is a seamount off Safaga that climbs from 400 m of open water to just under the surface.
#redsea #egypt #coralreef #anthias #scubadiving
🦈 Spinner sharks can carry their pups for eleven to fifteen months, then give birth to seven to eleven live young — and only every other year.
These ones were cruising past in slow stacked layers, fusiliers scattered all around them.
#spinnershark #sharks #scubadiving #marinelife #underwater
🌊 A bluespotted ribbontail ray doesn't have to see its dinner. Pores scattered across its snout and underside read the faint electric fields that living bodies leak into seawater — a crab under the sand is still lit up to a ray.
Settled on the sand flat at Gamul Kebir, Red Sea.
#stingray #marinebiology #redsea #scubadiving #oceanlife
🦞 A spiny lobster out walking the open sand in full daylight is not the normal order of things — these animals usually pass the sunlit hours jammed into a crevice and only come out to forage after dark.
This one strolled the reef floor in front of the camera on a December dive.
#spinylobster #scubadiving #marinelife #underwater #reeflife
👀 Spiny lobsters have no pincers to fight with, yet this one walked straight out across bare sand instead of backing into a hole.
🦞 Its defence is the spined antennae and a rasping screech it makes by rubbing them against a file under each eye.
#spinylobster #scubadiving #marinelife #reef #wildlife
Electric stingrays don't have the best eyesight it seems.
🤿 Electric rays spend most of the day tucked down into the sand, which is why one lifting off and crossing the open plateau in broad daylight is such a gift.
Filmed at Tobia Kebir, Safaga, on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
#RedSea #ElectricRay #ScubaDiving #Egypt #Safaga
🪸 Lilac, cream and white soft corals cover the Panorama South wall from the crest down into the blue, thick enough that you struggle to see rock.
Soft corals like these carry little or no algae inside them, so instead of using sunlight they filter plankton straight out of the current.
#softcoral #redsea #safaga #underwater #scubadiving
🐠 Hundreds of orange sea goldies pour off one coral head until the reef edge glows like it's plugged in.
Scalefin anthias over the reef at Gamul Kebir, Red Sea 🌊
#anthias #redsea #scubadiving #coralreef #ocean
🪸 This moray parks itself at a cleaning station like a car rolling into a wash.
Cleaner wrasse pick parasites off its skin and teeth — full reef valet service. Gamul Soraya, Red Sea.
#moray #cleanerwrasse #redsea #reef #marinelife
🐠 Look past the orange and a second school appears — silvery glassfish packed tight in the reef's shade.
These little sweepers bunch up by day for safety and drift out to feed after dark. Gamul Soraya, Red Sea.
#redsea #glassfish #scubadiving #coralreef #underwater
🐬 Bottlenose dolphins invent their own signature whistle as calves and use it like a name, even calling each other by it.
Two of them cruised past at Tobia Kebir, Red Sea 🌊
#dolphins #redsea #oceanlife #scuba #bottlenose
💙 The electric blue on this ribbontail ray isn't pigment — tiny structures in its skin bend light to make that colour glow.
Bluespotted ribbontail ray on the reef at Gamul Soraya, Red Sea.
#scubadiving #redsea #stingray #marinelife #bluespottedray
🤿 A moray eel undulated over the top of a resting octopus, body draping across those sucker rows, close enough to touch.
Neither animal broke off. Red Sea reef, Shaab Sheer.
#morayeel #octopus #redseadiving #reef #scuba
🐠 Cleaner wrasses run fixed stations on the reef, and reef fish queue up and hold still to be serviced — this porcupinefish pulled in for its turn.
Ras Abu Soma, Red Sea.
#porcupinefish #redsea #scubadiving #reef #underwatervideo
🐠 Nine seconds of fusiliers pouring over a coral wall and the school never once ran out — there was always more of it behind.
Filmed over the Acropora garden at Panorama North in the Egyptian Red Sea. 🌊
#fusilier #reddiving #redsea #reeflife #scuba
I think this is worth protecting
A single table coral, grown flat and wide enough that a whole shaded neighbourhood of fish lives in the gap beneath it 🐠 One animal, one roof.
Filmed at Panorama North in the Red Sea.
#coralreef #RedSea #scuba #tablecoral #ocean
🐠 Blue-spotted groupers all mature as females first. Some later become male. Nothing about this one tells you which stage it's at 🤿
Filmed at Ras Abu Soma, Red Sea — Cephalopholis argus, hovering over open sand.
#RedSea #Grouper #MarineBiology #ScubaDiving #Egypt
