🪸 Salem Express was the fifth name this ship wore. She was built at La Seyne-sur-Mer in France and entered service in 1966 as the Corsica ferry Fred Scamaroni.
Four renamings and twenty-five years later she came to rest here off Safaga, and the Red Sea has been building on her French steel ever since.
#salemexpress #fredscamaroni #shipwreck #safaga #redsea
🪸 Shaab Sheer, off Safaga, is about two kilometres of hard coral riddled with small caves and grottos.
One of them ends in an opening that stands up like a cathedral window, coral heads black against the sun and light coming down in shafts.
#shaabsheer #safaga #coralcave #swimthrough #redsea
🐠 Juvenile fourline wrasses make their living as cleaners, picking parasites off fish many times their own size.
This blue one held station under the belly of a Red Sea goatfish the whole way across the coral head, matching its speed the entire time.
#fourlinewrasse #cleanerwrasse #redseagoatfish #cleaningstation #redsea
🫧 A whole reef on idle: goatfish parked in mid-water, a cornetfish hanging motionless above the coral, fusiliers cruising over the top. Breathe out and just glide.
Shaab Claude, Egypt, Red Sea.
#redsea #scubadiving #coralreef #oceancalm #underwater
Two threadfin butterflyfish decided a drifting moon jelly belonged to them 🐠 They stayed on it, one on each side, mouths at the bell edge.
Shaab Claude, Red Sea, Egypt.
#redsea #butterflyfish #jellyfish #diving #coralreef
Giant barrel sponges 🪸 settle once and spend their entire lives on that one patch of rock — biologists call them the redwoods of the reef, because the big ones are measured in centuries, not seasons.
Filmed in the coral gardens of Cozumel, Mexico, part of the Mesoamerican reef. 🤿
#barrelsponge #cozumel #coralreef #scubadiving #ocean
🦐 The snapping shrimp comes up to the burrow mouth with a load of sand, dumps it and reverses back in — the tunnel needs rebuilding more or less permanently.
🐠 The shrimpgoby holds the entrance the whole time it works.
#pistolshrimp #shrimpgoby #snappingshrimp #scubadiving #reeflife
🪸 A young clown triggerfish spends its early life tucked into small caves thick with invertebrate growth, staying out of sight. Grown, it trades all that for open water along the reef slope.
🤿 This one is full size, cruising the coral with nothing to hide behind.
#clowntriggerfish #reeffish #coralreef #scubadiving #marinelife
Anthias feed without going anywhere 🐠 they hold position into the current above the reef and pick zooplankton out of the water as it drifts past them.
Hundreds doing it at once here. 🌊
#anthias #reeffish #coralreef #scubadiving #marinebiology
🌊 The camel cowfish is an Indo-Pacific fish, Red Sea included — but the species has pushed north through the Suez Canal and settled in the eastern Mediterranean.
This one was working a sandy patch beside the house reef, blowing jets of water into the seabed for buried worms.
#camelcowfish #tetrosomusgibbosus #boxfish #marinelife #scubadiving
Spaced evenly around the edge of a moon jellyfish's bell sit eight tiny sensory organs 👀 each one carrying a light-detecting eyespot and a gravity sensor, so the animal knows which way is up and where the light is without a brain to think about it.
A drifting bloom of them, house reef.
#moonjellyfish #jellyfish #marinebiology #scubadiving #underwater
🪸 Massive Porites — the boulder coral behind half of a Red Sea reef — adds roughly seven millimetres of skeleton in a year, measured on Red Sea colonies 😳
Which means a bommie taller than a diver has been quietly at it for centuries.
#coralreef #porites #redsea #marinebiology #scubadiving
🐢 Sponges are defended with glassy spicules and chemicals toxic to most animals, so hardly anything with a backbone will touch them — fewer than a dozen vertebrates specialise on them at all. 😳 The hawksbill turtle is one.
Watch the beak go straight down into the branches, hunting for exactly that.
#hawksbillturtle #seaturtlefacts #scubadiving #reeflife #ocean
🦈 Grey reef sharks cruising the coral edge in daylight, one after another, close enough over the table corals to almost brush them.
Daytime is their gathering shift — researchers tracking them found the same animals turning up together day after day.
#greyreefshark #sharks #scubadiving #coralreef #ocean
🫧 A hawkfish is an ambush predator that eats crabs and small fish — and at a cleaning station it simply switches off, fins spread, gills open, letting a wrasse a fraction of its size work it over.
Ten slow breaths of nothing but polyps waving and one blue fish doing its rounds.
#hawkfish #cleanerwrasse #coralreef #scubadiving #oceancalm
🐐 Goatfish get their name from the pair of long barbels hanging under the chin like a goat's beard — and that beard is a feeding tool, not a look.
Filmed in the Red Sea with the barbels laid flat across the bottom.
#goatfish #fishfacts #scubadiving #ocean
Sweepers are among the most abundant nocturnal fish on a coral reef 🐠, and this is how they spend the other half of it: parked under a Red Sea ledge doing absolutely nothing until dark, when they head out into open water after plankton.
Gamul Soraya, Egypt.
#sweeperfish #redsea #marinebiology #scubadiving #egypt
🪸 Yellow domes, blue-tipped branches and one violet colony stacked up a slope — this is Shaab Sheer in the Red Sea, a hard coral garden built entirely by animals.
Safaga, Egypt.
#redsea #coralreef #scubadiving #egypt #porites
🐙 Octopuses don't chase — they throw the webbed skin between their arms over a coral head like a net and grope blindly underneath for whatever is in there. Biologists call it speculative hunting, and you can watch one do it here.
Shaab Sheer, Red Sea. 🌊
#octopus #octopushunting #redsea #coralreef #scubadiving
🌊 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
