Finally, the pygmy seahorse post.
(My friend’s been asking for the pics; she’s one of these advertising types, you never can tell when a blunt pencil can be turned into a deadly weapon…) (I should know. Hee.)
The pygmy seahorse is one of the cutest creatures you’ll ever see diving. It’s cute as a button, a really tiny one, and blends in perfectly with the sea fan coral where it resides. With its tail curled around a branch, they get no bigger than 2.4cm, and some are barely 0.5cm.
Being so tiny, I sometimes wonder how the dive guides can spot them. We once joked that it’s possible they attach miniscule plastic toys to the sea fan and point them out to us as pygmy seahorses. Sometimes you can’t really tell, especially when there’s a current hitting you and you’re trying to stay still to focus and stare. But, if you strain your eyes and look carefully, or have a magnifying glass with you or get one from any good dive guide, you might just be able to see its gills move.
Really, I think their trick is once they know which sea fan the pygmy seahorse lives on, they just keep going back to that fan, coz the pygmy seahorses don’t really move around but live in the same area pretty much the whole time. And the dive guides know the waters so well they can probably remember the landmarks as easily as I can recall a tree at the park. (Underwater, everything is just a big blue realm to me.)
Still, it is quite amazing.
The pygmy seahorse will match the colour of the sea fan they live on. They have also evolved tubercles and a truncated snout to match the polyps found on that sea fan, be it red, orange, pink and blue, or, in the case of the one we saw and snapped a picture of, lavender.
In fact, pygmy seahorses are so well camouflaged, the first specimens were first discovered only when the host sea fan had been collected and put in an aquarium.
Anyhoo, the one we encountered on the wall dive at Angel’s Window was slightly bigger than the average pygmy seahorse — about the size of the nail on my pinkie finger (I’ve got small fingers, though) — which probably explains why my camera could focus on it in macro mode.
I once saw a eensy weensy pygmy seahorse (like half the size of the one we saw on this dive) coiled around a sea fan. It was shy, so it was turned away from the divers. But one of the divers, even with special external macro lens, kept trying to get closer. From where I was, it looked like he just kept banging the fan with his lens. Whether the glass hit the seahorse repeatedly or not, I could not tell. Still, the poor pygmy seahorse. I remember wanting to hit that diver’s head or take a stab at him with my pointer (maybe I should have gone with my gut instinct and done it). But he wasn’t the first. And he won’t be the last.
Anyhoo, Angel’s Window is a dive site so named because it has a cave swim through. I love the name (angels fascinate me) but the cave… um…
Here, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. But when we first started, all you see is a dark cave. Black. Shadows. And you’re underwater in a strange realm where you cannot breathe.
The dive guide asked if we were okay to go in. And I indicated okay. I was a little nervous, but that’s normal, like it was something I knew I could still manage. Small spaces tend to freak me out if I don’t know what I’m getting into. Like I can play hide and seek and climb into the back of a wardrobe and wait, or if a lift gets jammed, I know help will come eventually. But I think I’ll freak out if I have to crawl into, say, a sewer pipe with no knowledge of where it leads to and where I can get out. I guess that counts as claustrophobia.
Anyhoo, I didn’t have a torch, so basically I just followed the dive guide into the shadows and hoped for the best. I didn’t know how long the swim would be, but I figured it can’t be that long. If it was too long, there would have been a more thorough briefing on that before the dive.
Still, when shadows darted out at me from the blackness of the walls, I knew it was fishes but started all the same. I didn’t really appreciate my surroundings or the flora and fauna much in that swim-through. I think there were lots of psychedelically coloured lobsters on the rocks and the walls all around, but I didn’t see them at all.
Tags: diving, lembeh strait, pygmy seahorse
