All in the name of science. Here are some photos from the famous guppy hunt (see previous post for more details)! 

The sunset that evening really was spectacular. Dramatic clouds and a raging sea were tinged with the golden hue of the day's end. Fishermen came in and out of port as we sat on the rocky coastal shore. The marejada from the few previous days was finally calming down, yet still, every few minutes a giant set would roll in and our friends and surrounding rocks would be doused with chilly salt spray, a reprieve for the fauna inhabiting the otherwise shrinking intertidal pools.  

Happy Halloween! I think these teeny tiny fish photos + mad scientist are about as spooky as they come. 

One evening, Erwan decided that it would be a great idea if we all enjoyed the sunset together while trying to catch guppies from intertidal pools. The fun of this adventure was maximized with massive waves crashing into the coast, giving everyone a nice little unexpected spray from time to time. After a few minutes of worthless effort, Pablo and I found a nice dry spot to sit back and laugh at our friends being soaked and dominated by such minuscule fish. In the end, it was a great evening. Vale might have a new calling as a tiny fish hunter.

someone really likes guppies...

looking a bit dehydrated from a fatal ethanol bath, but still the colors are magnificent!

name of photo: still life with guppies

I said that I just returned from Norway and you might be wondering what the heck I was doing there.  And while I did do many things there, one thing I was most certainly not doing was vacationing.  Kudos to you if you take a vacation in Scandinavia but travel enthusiasts be warned, its gonna cost you.  Before we left, we were told that Norway is a very expensive country, at least for those not making a normal Norwegian salary, but this message didn't hit home until I bought a bottle of water and it cost me over five dollars!  Pretty insane.

But I was lucky enough to be sent (with about 20 other students) to Norway by my university.  Talk about a nice field trip.  So, at the end of April, we packed up our bags and followed our favorite Viking Professor to his home country to learn about high latitude marine ecosystems and how they differ from the Red Sea.  We had a glorious time.

I said that we were looking for sex on the reef, and that is the truth of it.  Just before sunset we would pack up our gear, grab whatever food was left in the fridge, charge up the camera batteries and head out to sea.  For ten nights and over twenty hours in the water, we swam up and down the same reef, one group at 20m below the surface, one at 15m, and one at 5m.  We searched the complex calcium carbonate conglomerate for evidence of action.  We became stalkers of the creepiest variety.

But while we were searching for sex, its not exactly what you might think.  We weren't seeking the internal, direct, gonochoric variety often favored by Homo sapiens,  no, we were looking for broadcast spawning.  Since sessile marine invertebrates can't very easily walk around town to find a partner, they often just bundled up their gametes and toss them out into the water.  Kinky, right?  Think about what you might be swimming in the next time you go to the beach.

If you are really going to study and organism in depth, at least from a biological point of view, you often need to know something about it's reproduction.  So, knowing that many reef organisms time their spawning with the warming of the sea in spring and also with the lunar cycle, we combed the reef for five nights before the full moon and five nights after the full moon in April.  And while I was sad that there was no conclusive spongey-business going on, we did see a whole slew of anemone weirdness, quite a bit of sea star and sea urchin sex, and the elusive and impressive coral spawn.  

Awesome photo below comes from Remy, aka, chief anemone creeper.

sea urchin spawning!

coral setting right before spawning!!

coral spawning, see the tiny round bundles flying up?

What happens in water after the sun goes down?  All the freaks come out to play.

Squishy, slimy, tentacled invertebrates that would make such a nice lunch for some nasty boney fish, take advantage of the cover of darkness to send out their polyps and scamper about while avoiding predators.  Without sunlight, there is no sense in photosynthesizing, they have to get more creative in their feeding.  To eat and not be eaten, that is the MO of nature.  So, dear spineless creatures, slither about, roll your googly eyes at me, and by all means catch some plankton, for the night is short and the day brings terrors.

silly crab has decided to carry a bunch of anemones on his back, must be why he's so grumpy

a worm so flat he floats away

teeny, tiny cup corals, so very cute

cucumbers with faces only a mother could love

giant slugs!!!

same cuttlefish, different color... I wish I could change colors

googlyist-eyed of them all, first prize goes to Mr. Flatfish

These photos come from a recent night-diving expedition that I was on.  For ten nights, two other ladies and I along with countless eager volunteers took to the dark, chilly, night-time waters in search of sex.  More on that to come...

Video credits and several of the photo credits go out to Remy and Pablo.