🌊 Grown green turtles live on seagrass and algae — and it takes them two decades or more of grazing to reach the size of the one sitting on this reef. The green in the name comes from the fat that diet builds, not the shell.
House reef, Red Sea.
#greenseaturtle #seagrass #redsea #seaturtle #oceanlife
Every little striped eel catfish in this ball 🐠 can reach around 30 cm — longer than your forearm — once it leaves the school behind.
Right now they're a few centimetres each, stacked into one moving mass over the soft coral.
#scubadiving #catfish #coralreef #marinebiology #underwater
The violet soft corals draping this Red Sea wall carry no algae in their tissue 🪸 — no sunlight food at all. They live entirely on plankton the current brings them, which is why they grow thickest where the water moves.
Panorama Reef north, Safaga, Egypt — Dendronephthya soft coral over every inch of the drop-off.
#softcoral #redsea #scubadiving #safaga #coralreef
🚢 The Salem Express is close to 115 metres of steel lying on the seabed, and these Red Sea anemonefish will spend their whole adult lives inside a single anemone on it. 🐠
Shaab Sheer, Safaga, Egypt.
#redsea #clownfish #wreckdiving #salemexpress #scuba
😳 Look into a great barracuda's mouth and there are two sets of teeth — a fine razor row on the outside, longer dagger teeth behind them, each one dropping into its own socket in the opposite jaw so the whole thing can close.
🐠 This one glided past close enough to count them, over the coral at Gamul Soraya in the Red Sea.
#barracuda #RedSea #marinelife #scubadiving #ocean
The count kept going up 🐠 A second pipefish slid down out of the soft coral, then a third crossed straight over its body until all three were touching.
Red Sea wreck, soft-coral overhang, no more than a hand's width between them.
#pipefish #redsea #scubadiving #marinelife #macrodiving
🐟 A moray eel opening and closing its jaws over and over looks like a warning. It isn't — morays have no bony gill covers, so every gape is a pump pushing water across the gills.
Tobia Kebir, Egyptian Red Sea, with two bluestreak cleaner wrasse working the same head.
#moray #redsea #scubadiving #marinebiology #egypt
🧡 The orange rosette on this sea slug's back is not a flower — it is the gill it breathes through. Nudibranch means "naked gill", and here is exactly why.
One slug, one coral head, house reef.
#nudibranch #seaslug #scubadiving #reeflife #macro
🚢 This hull was launched at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead and spent years running the Liverpool–Belfast night crossing as the Ulster Queen.
She is the Al Kahfain now, down at Shaab Sheer in Egypt since November 2005, in around 25 metres of blue water.
#wreckdiving #redsea #shipwreck #egypt #scuba
🐠 Watch what a scrawled filefish does with its tail — it keeps the whole fan furled shut while it cruises, like an umbrella nobody has opened yet.
Gamul Soraya, Safaga. Red Sea, June.
#redsea #filefish #scubadiving #oceanlife #reef
🪸 Purple soft corals, a burnt-orange sponge and an orange snowstorm of anthias over the top of it all. This is a seamount off Safaga that climbs from 400 m of open water to just under the surface.
#redsea #egypt #coralreef #anthias #scubadiving
🦈 Spinner sharks can carry their pups for eleven to fifteen months, then give birth to seven to eleven live young — and only every other year.
These ones were cruising past in slow stacked layers, fusiliers scattered all around them.
#spinnershark #sharks #scubadiving #marinelife #underwater
🌊 A bluespotted ribbontail ray doesn't have to see its dinner. Pores scattered across its snout and underside read the faint electric fields that living bodies leak into seawater — a crab under the sand is still lit up to a ray.
Settled on the sand flat at Gamul Kebir, Red Sea.
#stingray #marinebiology #redsea #scubadiving #oceanlife
🦞 A spiny lobster out walking the open sand in full daylight is not the normal order of things — these animals usually pass the sunlit hours jammed into a crevice and only come out to forage after dark.
This one strolled the reef floor in front of the camera on a December dive.
#spinylobster #scubadiving #marinelife #underwater #reeflife
👀 Spiny lobsters have no pincers to fight with, yet this one walked straight out across bare sand instead of backing into a hole.
🦞 Its defence is the spined antennae and a rasping screech it makes by rubbing them against a file under each eye.
#spinylobster #scubadiving #marinelife #reef #wildlife
☀️ Silhouetted against the surface they could be a flock circling overhead. They are triggerfish, and this is the Egyptian Red Sea.
Ras Abu Soma, looking up from mid-water.
#redsea #triggerfish #egyptdiving #scubadiving #oceanlife
🐠 A sabre squirrelfish turned to face the camera and simply hung there — pectoral fins fanned out wide, bright yellow pelvic fins dangling — holding its spot in mid-water without travelling anywhere.
That enormous eye is built for finding crabs and shrimp in the dark.
#squirrelfish #scubadiving #coralreef #underwater #oceanlife
🌊 Molars built for cracking sea urchins, and an eye sized for hunting in the dark: the bigeye emperor is a far stranger animal than its plain silver suit suggests.
Caught hovering over the reef top in bright daylight, hours before its shift starts.
#bigeyeemperor #reeflife #scubadiving #underwaterworld #fishid
Electric stingrays don't have the best eyesight it seems.
🤿 Electric rays spend most of the day tucked down into the sand, which is why one lifting off and crossing the open plateau in broad daylight is such a gift.
Filmed at Tobia Kebir, Safaga, on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
#RedSea #ElectricRay #ScubaDiving #Egypt #Safaga
🐬 Two wild bottlenose dolphins peeled off the blue and cruised straight up to my lens.
No rush, no fear — Red Sea, off Tobia Kebir.
#dolphins #scuba #redsea #bottlenose #ocean
