Photo of the Week: July 18, 2011

Hi Gang!

This week’s POTW is another image from my recent trip to the Philippines with Captain Steve and a gang of divers from Hawaiian Rafting Adventures. Both of the resorts we visited, Atlantis Dumaguete and Atlantis Puerto Galera, are known for their impressive populations of relatively small reef creatures. From the diving we enjoyed it is easy to see how well deserved their reputations are as meccas for critter diving. Day and night, it seemed like we saw every critter we could possibly ask for from rainbow colored nudibranchs to the craziest looking crabs and shrimps you can possibly imagine.

One of the fish we hoped to see was a stargazer, and we came across several of them during our night dives. An image of a stargazer from one of those night dives serves as this week’s POTW.

The image requires a little explanation for most people. So, let’s start with a quick overview of stargazers. Worldwide there are approximately 50 species of fishes described in the family Uranoscopidae. Collectively speaking, the common name for these fishes is stargazers. Stargazers get their common name from the fact that their eyes are located high atop their head. This positioning makes stargazers look as if they are staring toward the heavens, hence their common name. These fishes have an upward facing mouth, and often bury themselves “up to their eyeballs” in the sand so that all you see is their eyes, the top of their head and the outline of their mouth. 

When feeding stargazers “leap up” or “explode” from their buried position to ambush their unsuspecting prey which consists of a mixture of fishes and invertebrates that pass overhead, but close enough to become a meal. In addition, some species of stargazers are equipped with a lure that grows from the bottom of their mouth. The lure is used to attract prey. 

In this week’s POTW image I was lucky enough to catch a stargazer using its reddish orange ribbon-like lure as it was trying to capture a meal. While the face of a stargazer makes them a great photographic subject, what makes this image special- at least to me- is the use of the fish’ lure. Without this rather long caption I suspect some people, even a high percentage of fairly experienced divers, would not recognize what is happening in this photograph.

Stargazers are venomous as they are equipped with two fairly large poison-delivering spines located behind the opercle and above their pectoral fin. As sedentary fishes, this is a good means of self-defense. Some species are also capable of delivering an electric shock created by an electricity producing organ made from highly modified muscles used in the vision system of other fishes.

I captured this week’s POTW with a 60mm lens mounted on a D300, an indication that it is fairly easy to get close to a stargazer once you manage to find one. I was fearful that I was getting so close that I might cause the fish to quit “baiting its prey”. But I got lucky, and was able to get my shot.

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW!

See you next wee,

Marty