More Island Sightings

1. TWO MANTA RAYS, cruising past us on separate mornings at our study site right in the middle of a working fish catching dive. Having never seen a manta ray before it was the most lovely and bizarre experience to be looking up from a chaos of hand nets and clove oil and scared little blue and yellow fish in plastic bags to see this beautiful creature winging past, when I'd always thought that at some point in my life I would have to pay lots of money and travel 3 days on a boat to go to some godforsaken Indonesian Bornean island especially to see them. With the first one, the first thing I saw was a couple of really quite large remoras right next to me which cruise around with it -- the first thing I thought was "crap, there's got to be something HUGE in the water, what are the bets are it's a giant shark?" but then it turned out to be a manta! There are no photos as only my assistant had her camera with her to take photos of caught fish with, and she says by the time she had finished gaping at them and gotten to her camera they were gone...

2. Our frog doing this most horrible looking belching thing on the shelf yesterday. He kept gulping and his whole body looked like it was convulsing with each gulp. We were really worried but later on he hopped out on his nightly hunt looking as healthy as ever so we have decided he was just eating a really big spider. Here is a picture of him, not belching, in Helen's hand.



3. A couple of unbelievable dead calm days. Even on the best of days in Malaysia I had never seen the sea look quite like this -- like glass, so reflective I couldn't figure out where the reefs were to drive around them. Yet if you looked straight down you could probably do fish focals from the boat, so ripple-less and still was it, and we saw some lovely big rays in the lagoon sand on our drive home from work that day, and visibility was like being out on outer barrier at over 20 metres. Apparently more such calm periods are on the way as the summer develops, woohoo, it makes a gorgeous change from the 25-30 knot wind we had for a few days last week.



4. Don't like putting on a suit everyday to go to work? Here are my work clothes: