The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

As it got dark the sharks started circling the boat. They were attracted by the fish, which were attracted by the plankton, which were attracted by the lights from the back of the boat.

So we decided to jump in the water for a dive.

The ocean was black except for our flashlights and the light from the boat.

The polyps all open up at night so the corals look bigger sometimes.

The eels are also out and about at night hunting. We tried looking hard for a octopus or cuttlefish but no luck.

Kerri’s not sure what this is.

She knows this is a starfish, but there aren’t many starfish so she didn’t know where to put this picture.

Or this one.

This is a pretty big worm that have been in a couple of different other areas.

This starfish was hanging out all his own.

We had to be carful circling the bommies as sometimes there would be big overhangs.

This may have been a picture of the fish, or the coral, or maybe something else that is camouflaged.

This was a fire clam hiding in a little crevice.

This is probably just a cool picture of the different types of coral.

This is an eel…we think. He was cute hanging out in a tiny hole.

We have no idea what this is.

Also no idea what this was. Something spiky?

This was a turtle that we saw swimming around below, but this time grabbing some air.

These two weird things don’t even belong underwater.

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.