🦐 The snapping shrimp comes up to the burrow mouth with a load of sand, dumps it and reverses back in — the tunnel needs rebuilding more or less permanently.
🐠 The shrimpgoby holds the entrance the whole time it works.
#pistolshrimp #shrimpgoby #snappingshrimp #scubadiving #reeflife
🪸 A young clown triggerfish spends its early life tucked into small caves thick with invertebrate growth, staying out of sight. Grown, it trades all that for open water along the reef slope.
🤿 This one is full size, cruising the coral with nothing to hide behind.
#clowntriggerfish #reeffish #coralreef #scubadiving #marinelife
Anthias feed without going anywhere 🐠 they hold position into the current above the reef and pick zooplankton out of the water as it drifts past them.
Hundreds doing it at once here. 🌊
#anthias #reeffish #coralreef #scubadiving #marinebiology
🌊 The camel cowfish is an Indo-Pacific fish, Red Sea included — but the species has pushed north through the Suez Canal and settled in the eastern Mediterranean.
This one was working a sandy patch beside the house reef, blowing jets of water into the seabed for buried worms.
#camelcowfish #tetrosomusgibbosus #boxfish #marinelife #scubadiving
Spaced evenly around the edge of a moon jellyfish's bell sit eight tiny sensory organs 👀 each one carrying a light-detecting eyespot and a gravity sensor, so the animal knows which way is up and where the light is without a brain to think about it.
A drifting bloom of them, house reef.
#moonjellyfish #jellyfish #marinebiology #scubadiving #underwater
🪸 Massive Porites — the boulder coral behind half of a Red Sea reef — adds roughly seven millimetres of skeleton in a year, measured on Red Sea colonies 😳
Which means a bommie taller than a diver has been quietly at it for centuries.
#coralreef #porites #redsea #marinebiology #scubadiving
🐢 Sponges are defended with glassy spicules and chemicals toxic to most animals, so hardly anything with a backbone will touch them — fewer than a dozen vertebrates specialise on them at all. 😳 The hawksbill turtle is one.
Watch the beak go straight down into the branches, hunting for exactly that.
#hawksbillturtle #seaturtlefacts #scubadiving #reeflife #ocean
🦈 Grey reef sharks cruising the coral edge in daylight, one after another, close enough over the table corals to almost brush them.
Daytime is their gathering shift — researchers tracking them found the same animals turning up together day after day.
#greyreefshark #sharks #scubadiving #coralreef #ocean
🫧 A hawkfish is an ambush predator that eats crabs and small fish — and at a cleaning station it simply switches off, fins spread, gills open, letting a wrasse a fraction of its size work it over.
Ten slow breaths of nothing but polyps waving and one blue fish doing its rounds.
#hawkfish #cleanerwrasse #coralreef #scubadiving #oceancalm
🐐 Goatfish get their name from the pair of long barbels hanging under the chin like a goat's beard — and that beard is a feeding tool, not a look.
Filmed in the Red Sea with the barbels laid flat across the bottom.
#goatfish #fishfacts #scubadiving #ocean
Sweepers are among the most abundant nocturnal fish on a coral reef 🐠, and this is how they spend the other half of it: parked under a Red Sea ledge doing absolutely nothing until dark, when they head out into open water after plankton.
Gamul Soraya, Egypt.
#sweeperfish #redsea #marinebiology #scubadiving #egypt
🪸 Yellow domes, blue-tipped branches and one violet colony stacked up a slope — this is Shaab Sheer in the Red Sea, a hard coral garden built entirely by animals.
Safaga, Egypt.
#redsea #coralreef #scubadiving #egypt #porites
🐙 Octopuses don't chase — they throw the webbed skin between their arms over a coral head like a net and grope blindly underneath for whatever is in there. Biologists call it speculative hunting, and you can watch one do it here.
Shaab Sheer, Red Sea. 🌊
#octopus #octopushunting #redsea #coralreef #scubadiving
🌊 Grown green turtles live on seagrass and algae — and it takes them two decades or more of grazing to reach the size of the one sitting on this reef. The green in the name comes from the fat that diet builds, not the shell.
House reef, Red Sea.
#greenseaturtle #seagrass #redsea #seaturtle #oceanlife
Every little striped eel catfish in this ball 🐠 can reach around 30 cm — longer than your forearm — once it leaves the school behind.
Right now they're a few centimetres each, stacked into one moving mass over the soft coral.
#scubadiving #catfish #coralreef #marinebiology #underwater
The violet soft corals draping this Red Sea wall carry no algae in their tissue 🪸 — no sunlight food at all. They live entirely on plankton the current brings them, which is why they grow thickest where the water moves.
Panorama Reef north, Safaga, Egypt — Dendronephthya soft coral over every inch of the drop-off.
#softcoral #redsea #scubadiving #safaga #coralreef
🚢 The Salem Express is close to 115 metres of steel lying on the seabed, and these Red Sea anemonefish will spend their whole adult lives inside a single anemone on it. 🐠
Shaab Sheer, Safaga, Egypt.
#redsea #clownfish #wreckdiving #salemexpress #scuba
😳 Look into a great barracuda's mouth and there are two sets of teeth — a fine razor row on the outside, longer dagger teeth behind them, each one dropping into its own socket in the opposite jaw so the whole thing can close.
🐠 This one glided past close enough to count them, over the coral at Gamul Soraya in the Red Sea.
#barracuda #RedSea #marinelife #scubadiving #ocean
The count kept going up 🐠 A second pipefish slid down out of the soft coral, then a third crossed straight over its body until all three were touching.
Red Sea wreck, soft-coral overhang, no more than a hand's width between them.
#pipefish #redsea #scubadiving #marinelife #macrodiving
🐟 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
