We only saw one jellyfish on the Great Barrier Reef.
But it was huge.
And moved a lot.
There were several fish hanging out in the mantle and grabbing a snack.
They were avoiding getting stung.
Since this was the only one there are a lot of pictures of it.
One of the night dives was done with different torches that output blue/UV light. This caused the corals and other organisms to fluoresce.
This is used to check the health of the reef as living coral fluoresces.
A shark kept following us around and getting in the way, which was annoying because he did not fluoresce.
The reef took on a completely different look.
Most of the corals fluoresce green.
There were some reds but it was harder for the camera to pick it up.
The greens were very bright.
It was a bit tricky to light.
The sea squirts didn’t fluoresce but the other corals do.
It looked really cool seeing the reef in a completely different light.
We didn’t move around much and just found a spot and got as close as we could to really check out the reef.
This let us see some really cool things.
Like these tiny organisms that were called coral fleas.
They looked really neat walking all over the coral. Never would have noticed them without the different lights which lit them right up.
We found Nemo!
And Marlin!
And Nemo’s cousin.
And neighbours.
And great aunt.
The third cousins twice removed.
There were lots of clown fish.
But they always look really cool with the anemones swaying around.
Bye bye Nemo.
This post is all about the corals and grasses.
There were some pretty cool fan corals.
There were many sponges and sea squirts.
The corals were sometimes really bright colours.
Other times they just grew in cool shapes.
Everything on the the reef grows on top of each other if it can.
Lots of the coral grow in cool shapes.
Okay so urchins do move but really slowly. They hide during the day so they don’t get eaten.
Even in tiny areas there are so many different types of coral.
We weren’t really sure what this was. It is brightly coloured so it might be a worm or sea slug.
Most of the “stuff that doesn’t move” filter the water for plankton to eat.
The bommies are giant pillars of corals, built on old coral, with new coral growing on top.
The day and night can look quite different with some organisms closed up.
Even within individual corals cool patterns form.
We always had to keep our distance so as not to damage the coral although sometimes this was because it might sting.
Matt liked to try to get close as we progressed through more and more dives.
Much to our surprise the minke whales were already hanging out in the reef.
We were able to go snorkelling while they were around.
They tend to investigate boats for quite a while.
These two showed up while we were below doing our dive.
Thankfully they hung around after we were done and were still interested in checking us out.
They swarm right underneath us.
And beside us.
They were really really cool to swim with as they were really big and would just appear and then swim off into the darkness.
