Wednesday, October 28, 2009

#11: Spider crabs, soldierfish and Australian fur seal footage

Our first dive today wasn't sea dragon related, but we still came across some great animals like this group of spider crabs (there must have been 50 or more on the surrounding stumps) and this soldierfish.

Spider crabs (Photo: Jeremy Brodt)

Soldierfish (Photo: Jeremy Brodt)

We did yet another sunset/evening dive in an attempt to catch some weedy sea dragon breeding behavior, but unfortunately the water visibility wasn't very good so it was harder to find dragons. We did find a few, but they often became distracted by our presence and would swim away.

Regardless, the dive was quite eventful thanks to a curious juvenile Australian fur seal that became interested by my presence.

And later in the dive I spotted this common gunard perch.

Common gunard perch (Photo: Jeremy Brodt)

Cheers,
Jeremy

Labels: fur seal, Jeremy Brodt, perch, Seadragons2009, soldierfish, spider crab

Join these explorers from the New England Aquarium as they travel around the blue planet.

Note

This is an archived page in the Global Explorers blog. Visit the active blog here.

Brian Skerry

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Brian Skerry is the Aquarium's Explorer in Residence and an award-winning National Geographic Magazine photographer who specializes in marine wildlife subjects and stories about the underwater world. Brian typically spends up to 8 months each year in the field working in locations of extreme contrasts from polar climes to tropical reefs.

Randi Rotjan

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Dr. Randi Rotjan is a research scientist at the Aquarium. Her research addresses the interface between ecology, symbiosis and behavior to ultimately determine how organisms interact with their environments. She is currently on an expedition studying coral ecosystems in Belize.

Sunnye Dreyfus

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Sunnye Collins Dreyfus is an Education Programs Coordinator at the Aquarium.

Kara Mahoney Robinson

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Kara Mahoney Robinson is an Education Programs Coordinator at the Aquarium. Her interests include educating school groups and families, learning as much as she can about whales and looking for opportunities to combine the two.