The Blue-Ringed Octopus, Hapalochlaena maculosa, has one of the deadliest toxins of all sea creatures! Its venomous bite can easily kill a human despite its diminutive size of less than 12cm. Fortunately human deaths are very rare as long as effective treatment is close at hand. Edithburgh has a large population of these fascinating critters […]
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The Devil’s In Town
In many years of diving Edithburgh Jetty is my first every encounter with a Western Blue Devil, Paraplesiops meleagris. One of the most visually striking in both form and colour of all the southern Australian reef fishes, the Western Blue Devil normally is found lurking in caves and under ledges of deeper offshore reefs. This […]
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Prime numbers are common in plants but not so common with animals unless you are talking about starfish. The eleven-armed sea star, Coscinasterias muricata, is our largest starfish and very common here in South Australia. There were plenty of these starfish under Edithburgh Jetty but this guy was the only one nicely posing for a […]
Read MoreLarge Magellanic Cloud
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby (on cosmological terms) galaxy clearly visible as a small cloud to the naked eye in the southern night sky. As a neighboring galaxy in our local group it is considered a suburb of our own Milky Way galaxy. At around 163,000 light year away it is humbling […]
Read MoreBranchial Fire
Our most common nudibranch (sea slug) Ceratosoma brevicaudatum is a beautiful creature. It is very hard to capture all of its detail in a single image due to its size and the depth of field challenges of macro imaging. This rear view end shows the detail and complexity of its branchial plume, the organ it […]
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