Introduction:
Welcome to a new blog type, the “geek out,” as we’re calling it!
In these blogs that I hope to take on from time to time, I will basically be info dumping. I’m going to take a topic, an occurrence, or a bit of recent news that has come across my mind that has effectively blown it. You can thank my friend Blake Rackley for this series, see Rewind The Podcast, as he suggested it to me this afternoon.
If I’m being real, I had no idea what to write about today, do I posted a prompt this morning asking folks what they would like to read. Blake was the only person to respond & he simply said “geek out on something!” As I have mentioned many times across many different blogs & many different sectors of my life, I am in a fairly high percentile for ADHD & with any form of neurodivergence, comes hyperfixation. When someone of the neurodivergent persuasion experiences a hyperfixation, it basically acts as a burst of passion. We get hella focused on that one thing, often to the detriment of our own health & wellbeing. It consumes us, we forget to eat, procrastinate using the bathroom, self isolate for hours on end, doomscroll any video or post we can find on the topic, gather & read books, watch videos, etc., etc., etc., all to eventually take that information & spill it out to the nearest person with an ear. There are a lot of topics for me that fit this category; Star Wars, Marvel, Crystals, Marine Biology, Astronomy, Quantum Physics, Plants, Food, Drinks, Animals in general, whatever else have you. & while I could ramble extensively about many of those topics, the thing that came to mind when I thought about things that made me ‘geek out,’ were two stories that I acquired while diving in the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia.
Context:
The Lembeh Strait is a fourteen mile stretch of water that sits between the volcanic islands of Sulawesi & Lembeh, hence the name. It is primarily used by cargo ships arriving at Bitang, as well as by locals for fishing, & happens to also be one of the top dive destinations in the world. The reason for the latter aspect is multifold. For starters, the Lembeh Strait has almost no current, until you get to the North or South ends of it. This allows for all of the sediment; all of the debris blown by the wind, all of the silt washed down from the rains off the islands, anything else dropped by humans or other animals, to matriculate & collect on the bottom creating what is known lovingly in the dive world as ‘muck.’ People come from all over the world to ‘muck dive’ in Lembeh because of the wide array of biodiversity found there within. Where Lembeh typically might find itself short on pelagic wildlife (whales, dolphins, sharks, manta rays, etc.), it certainly makes up for in macro (sea slugs, nudibranchs, small crustaceans & octopus) as well as unique marine life (stargazers, ribbon & garden eels, rhinopias scorpionfish, seahorses, pipefish, lembeh sea dragon, wonderpus, flamboyant cuttlefish). I had the privilege of diving the strait back on October of 2021 & these are two stories that I still ‘geek out’ over to this day!
Clownfish:
This story is going to involve a few different characters. The first you may have guessed, a small school of clownfish. We’re going to be focusing specifically on the large matriarch of the group as well as the carpet anemone they all inhabited. The next players in this play are a small school of threadfin cardinalfish. They unfortunately play unfortunate rolls in most of my Lembeh stories in which they are involved. The last will be the humans, of which there are three: Sam (my dive buddy for the trip), Puri (our dive guide for the trip), & me (your narrator for this first hand account). That last group will also be present in the following story.
I’m not quite sure the specific dive site that this all took place on, I’m sure if I went back to my Indonesian Travel Blog, that I could tell you, but it’s an unimportant detail, so we shan’t concern ourselves with it any longer at this present moment. I want to say we were about halfway through the afternoon dive at this point when we came across the clowns & their anemone.
Now normally when you’re diving, especially in the South Pacific, clownfish & anemones are about a dime a dozen, you don’t pay a crazy amount of attention to them. This time, for whatever reason, was different.
We had come out of the murk to find this carpet anemone that had to be about 2-3 feet in diameter. It was teeming with life. Not just from the half a dozen or so clownfish who lived in it, but also the handful of porcelain crabs & the nearby school of threadfin cardinals. As soon as we approached all of the fish, cardinals included, pushed in on the anemone.
A bit of science before we continue. Clownfish & certain anemones share a symbiotic relationship. This is possible because the clownfish produce a specific type of mucus which coats their skin & keeps the anemone’s stinging cells, known as nematocysts, from stinging them. Other fish do not share this advantage. The clowns gain protection & a food source from the anemone, feeding on parasites & damaged cells from the anemone, & the anemone gains a caretaker in the clowns. The clowns clean the anemone, keep it from other fish or predators that would eat the anemone, & occasionally do something else quite different…which we’ll get to here, for the anemone. The anemone also feeds on the waste of the clownfish & many times the clowns will even outright feed the anemone. Mine in my reef tank will always pull over big chunks of krill or squid into their anemone. Back to it.
So we’re gathered around the anemone, pointing out all the little invertebrates cohabitating when something interesting happens. The largest clownfish, the matriarch, leaves the anemone.
She definitely ventured out farther than she should have, a handful of feet, which is still a lot for her in a large, barren stretch of ocean with three ‘predators’ hanging about. But she’s not fleeing from us. No, she’s making good on that promise of mutualism that she & the anemone has. For you see, madam clownfish has gone & grabbed a leaf of cardboard & drug it back to sit in the middle of the anemone. It is then that the proceeds to yank the cardboard up in the water, release it, & as it drifts back down, scurry underneath. She does this at least three times before the realization hits me & I am floored by the connotations. Miss ma’am is fishing.
I know I’ve only mentioned them twice thus far, once in passing, but do you remember the second character in our story, the threadfin cardinal fish. There in lies the prey we are after to feed our anemone.
The clown is fishing using two things; the cardboard but also the fear the threadfins have of us as three large beings who appeared out of the haze & approached the only slight bit of shelter in the surrounding area. She is trying to get the cardinal fish to hide under the cardboard with the rest of the clowns, knowing that the weight of the cardboard will push them into the stinging tentacles of the carpet anemone below. She either recognized us as a threat, but not a great enough one to not risk using it to her advantage, or recognized divers & knew that her school was not at risk, but that she could use our presence to her advantage. Whichever angle you take on it blows my mind. It feels like something you would see on a nature documentary with the narrator talking about “something that has never been filmed before.”
Butterflyfish:
Originally, when I was thinking about the layout & construction of this blog, I was only going to include the clownfish story. Then I figured, ‘well, since we’re already talking about diving in Lembeh,’ I should offer you another moment that caused me to “geek out.” This is the tale of the butterflyfish.
Again we have three parties at play here. We have the divers (Sam, Puri, Me), we have the butterflyfish, & our unfortunate party this time around, the damselfish. Now, don’t go feeling too bad for the damselfish, they are notorious assholes. They are the one fish who has attacked me time & time again while diving. I’ve also had to remove many a damsel from my fish tanks over the years as they breed & become highly aggressive. We don’t feel sorry for them here, understood? Good.
This story does not take place on a muck dive, in fact that is one of the other appeals of Lembeh Strait, you don’t just had a singular type of dive that you spend your whole week doing. In addition to the muck there is the next step up, rubble dives (rock, broken coral, sparse reef) & the reef dive. This story takes place on the north end of the strait at a site called Angel’s Window.
Angel’s Window is a reef growing out of a one hundred foot spire on the north end of the exact middle of the strait. It is deeming with life. If you want to read more about that dive see part two of my Lembeh Blog. We’re going to focus on the end of it.
We’d gone down, swam through the window (yes, there’s an actual ‘window’ down there), seen the eels, & were making our way back up gradually, enjoying the views along the way. As we began to wrap around the western edge of the tower we suddenly found ourself amidst a school of probably around 50-100 blacklip butterflyfish. They immediately surrounded us in a cloud of yellow, white, & black. In the middle of this amazement I was suddenly struck by something, a damsel. It had come off of the reef & made a b-line for my hand. As soon as it made contact, the butterflies were gone.
The butterflyfish, much like the clownfish, had made an interesting observation it seems when it came to divers. It seems as though damselfish are much more interested keeping the larger of the potential predators, us, off the reef & away from their eggs, then they are about keeping a school of butterflyfish from them. The butterflies had seized the opportunity & swung in while the damsel was away to eat as many eggs as they could scavenge before the damselfish returned to shoo them all off. The crazy part is, the butterflyfish didn’t stop there, they followed up around the reef.
I remember not wanting to leave the feeding frenzy. Puri had a board & a pencil with him, which he flashed to me. On it he had written “they will follow.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that until we went on our way & I turned around to find the entire school of butterflyfish in our wake, charging in to clear out caches of damselfish eggs as the damsels came off the reef to attack us. They were using our presence on the reef to get a quick & easy meal.
In Conclusion:
I hope you enjoyed my two “geek out” stories this week. Blake, I hope something like this was what you were looking for from this blog, if not, we’ll chat. If any of these stories sounded familiar to you it’s probably because I’ve either told them to you in person or because you read my Indonesia Travel Blog where you can find these & many more of the Nat Geo-esque stories from that trip!
As always, much love to you all,
-C