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Pot loads `o pygmies! |
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Pygmy seaponies are smaller yet! |
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Find your first one, then find them by the dozen |
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Cows? Nope. Horses? Closer. West? Western Pacific that is. And this October and November we'll be ridin' the currents chasing after Pygmy Seahorses, herds of them, stampeding across seafans everywhere you look in the Solomon Islands. |
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Yeah, I know what you are thinking. You're thinking there goes Chris again, off on one of his tall tales. But I swear it's true. I don't blame you for not believing me. After I promised you once before that Elvis would co-host all our future tours in a clumsy, feeble, and, frankly, desperate attempt to boost our tour business, you have good reason to doubt my word. I'm genuinely ashamed of that sorry episode. Yet this time, I'm really telling the truth! They're everywhere out there, these pygmy seahorses. For ten years we've dived the Solomons, focusing our high magnification lenses on seafans countless numbers of times, |
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shooting crabs, gobies, polyps, shrimp... anything that moved, slithered, .crawled or just sat there on the branches of the trillions (opps! there I go again)... millions of seafans that cloak the reefs of the Solomons. Yet never once did we or any of our eagle-eyed guests -- even by accident -- see or photograph one of these miniature seahorses |
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Then in the last few years, photos of these incredible little animals starting filtering out of such diverse locations as the Coral Sea, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Indeed, we ourselves became the first to find and photograph this diminutive undersea equine in Milne Bay. But I had previously spent the better part of an entire season in the Solomons going quite blind combing seafans inch by inch, searching for them without success. I knew they were there. I could just smell `em! |
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Alas, it took a guest on another trip later that year to spot the first one in this region. Apparently there is more than one species of pygmy seahorse, one even tinier than the other. By the time last season rolled around, several more had been found, and we were excited to return to see for ourselves. But all sightings had been of the smaller, less attractive species, a species so puny they may not even rise to the status of a seahorse. Pygmy Seapony is probably more like it. Curiously though, the smaller ones are actually easier to see. Their camouflage is not as extraordinary, and they are seemingly more active in the day, grazing on fodder carried by the currents and trapped in the fine mesh net of the the seafan branches. Yet at 1/16 hands (1/4"), these seaponies remained a distinct challenge to my eyes grown weak from age and debauchery. |
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But this time, we literally couldn't miss. Once we got the hang of it, after we saw our first couple dozen or so, we start finding them practically everywhere, on nearly any sea fan that we looked carefully at. Where previously lines of photographers would queue up waiting for a shot or two at just a single pygmy, now so many were being found that everyone could have their pick of the remuda. |
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The larger species, measuring a robust 1/8 hands (1/2"), is infinitely more adorable with their pug noses and swollen bellies, and they are possessed of perhaps the most effective camouflage I have ever seen. Their scaly white skin is covered with bright reddish knobs, the combination perfectly mimicking the red polyp nodes on the seafan branches. I'm tempted to call this species the psoriasis pygmy seahorse, but I'm told that name fails to fully capture the romance and fantasy of the creature. So perfect is their camouflage that only their coal black eyes give them away. But since they see you long before you spot them, they will slowly turn away and tuck their heads down, hiding their eyes while presenting only their backs. Extremely careful inspection may reveal a thin tail curled around a fan branch, and this is often the only way to ever find them. Yet, in a discouraging replay of the previous year, I continued my perfect record of complete failure in finding one, which only served to fuel my obsession to more disturbing levels. I knew they were here, and retained just enough wits to realize their cuteness was merely a mask for their cruel and sadistic nature. They were out to drive me nuts, and were succeeding brilliantly. It wasn't the photos I wanted especially. I already had decent results from Papua New Guinea. Rather, it was my conviction they were here, and my inability to find them. Captain Ahab had nothing on me. I was descending into madness. |
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In a concession to the march of time, I had taken to carrying a magnifying glass. I had all but written it off as a useless aid, for it had done me no good whatsoever. Yet time after time, hour after hour underwater, I found myself dumbly scanning another seafan through my looking glass, always in vain. It had become an automatic and mindless process, and I would struggle to maintain a fraction of the degree of unbroken concentration required. |
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The sudden awareness absolutely jolted me, for its image seemed to just materialize from within a tangle of polyps and branches. I blinked and squinted, disbelieving my own eyes. Like a magical creature in a fairy tale, there it was -- puckered mouth, squashed face, and those pure black eyes. It was staring straight at me, frozen motionless as if it sensed I may have spotted it, but that it might still escape detection if it didn't |
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so much as move a fin. I could only imagine how my eye must have appeared from the other side of the magnifying glass, swollen by the lens, bulging with with excitement! An alien cyclops come to conquer all in its path. |
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I was to find several more pygmy seahorses on that one fan. I'll confess, I had painstakingly examined this very same fan several times previously. Knowing how often I passed over these very same seahorses, I wondered how many dozens -- how many hundreds perhaps -- I had also missed along the way. To simply blame my lack of skill in locating them is amply justified, but in doing so it detracts somewhat from the utter mastery of camouflage displayed by this animal. It diminishes in part the wonder of nature represented by the pygmy seahorse. To think that in all the years of diving the Solomons, the tens of thousands of hours spent underwater by thousands of divers, this was the very first of this species to be discovered only adds to my appreciation of what nature has created. My excitement was every bit as real and as great as when a pod of killer whales swam past us in these very same waters a couple of years previously. And that, is it not, one of the very great attractions of diving? To be able to experience a world where so much remains to be discovered, where we can share our immediate environment with wildlife both enormous and staggeringly powerful, as well as tiny and delicate to the point of being invisible. What other amazing creatures have we all overlooked? Well, I have since learned there is a species of pygmy seahorse that lives on soft coral, and whose camouflage perfectly matches the soft coral's spiky polyp clusters. I will predict right here and now that they too are in the Solomons. I know they are. I can just smell `em! |
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