by Barry Brown | Jun 4, 2017 | Fish, Reef, Science
Good morning, I’m having one of those can’t catch up, too much to do weeks and like always these blogs tend to suffer. If you ever see just a photo and no text like yesterday you know I am busy.. This is one of the many super small, colorful, deep-sea basses that high end aquarium collectors go crazy for, this one is called a cave bass or Liopropoma mowbrayi. When I say small, I’m talking around three inches in length and NO these are not babies or juveniles they are in fact full grown adults. These little sea-bass or basslets come in a wide range of beautiful colors and are very reclusive making them very hard to find. by Barry Brown | Jun 2, 2017 | Fish, Reef, Science
Good morning out there, if your like us your recovering from a long but fun Memorial day weekend. We ate like kings, did a bunch of fun hikes with the dogs, went mountain biking with friends, roller-blading and on and on, wiped out! I have a tiny inch and a half scorpionfish for you all today found by our science friends at this little museum called the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, maybe you heard of it?? Over the years I have seen so many different species of rare, deep-sea scorpaena sp. come up from the deep and if you all remember one of these species was even named after yours truly, that little fish can be seen by clicking on the link found on the front of my home page by Admin | May 31, 2017 | Fish, Reef, Science
Good morning out there, I am completely wiped out this morning after doing two big mountain bike rides, one in the morning and one in the evening, combined that’s around four hours worth of hard pedaling. So today I have a little three inch long Bathyanthias sp for today, the “sp.” means this could again be a new species and until our favorite Smithsonian scientists do DNA work they really don’t know. These creatures and fish I post are super rare and most have either only been found dead or are not know yet at all because of the insane depth they come from. Take this guy above for instance , put Bathyanthias sp in your GOOGLE search and very little will come up, why you ask?? by Barry Brown | May 30, 2017 | Fish, Reef, Science
Here’s a WOWZERS fish for you all this morning called a Decodon puellaris or a deep-sea red hogfish and this is the juvenile of that species. When older this crazy colorful little fish will loose a lot of these colors and markings and turn a dark orange or reddish color, still beautiful but nothing like his or her baby colors. For those of you wondering about size, this one here is about three inches in length. These fish are incredible little hunters and love brittle stars, crabs, shrimps and urchins, in fact it’s fish like this that keep most of the invertebrates hidden on the reef most of the day. On many occasions I have seen these fish picking on and trying to eat hermit crabs as well, they are true reef bullies and not as nice as they appear to be. This was another in the long list of cool finds from St by Barry Brown | May 28, 2017 | Fish, Reef, Science
Good morning all, I have a super tiny, (about the size of a dime), deep-sea butterflyfish for you all today called a Prognathodes aculeaths. For years the Smithsonian and Substation Curacao have collected the adult sized butterflyfish from the deep using a submersible but this is the first baby or juvenile I had ever seen or photographed. From Wikipedia I found this little blurb; Longsnout butterflyfish are much more solitary than many other members of their family. They also inhabit deeper reefs and spend much of their time foraging in recesses for invertebrates. It is also known to eat the tube feet of sea urchins and tube worm tentacles by Barry Brown | May 26, 2017 | Invertebrates, Reef, Science
Hi all, as most of you already know I have the worlds largest collection of live slit-shell photos from all over the Caribbean and now I have them from St. Eustatius. These little beauties were all found on the same trip and they looked different than others we had seen from other areas of the Caribbean, meaning they seemed smaller and lighter then normal. These were all collected by the Smithsonian Institution and Substation Curacao on their two week expedition to St. Eustatius and yours truly got to spend many a day with them with camera in hand.
