A Quick Trip to Redang: Anemones and Their Fishes

As always on a dive trip, I’m fascinated by the vividly coloured anemones and their impossibly cute fish. I never get tired of taking photos of them. This time at Redang, some of the anemones were also affected by the bleaching and there were some very unusual colours. This green and blue anemone wasn’t so badly affected as it’s pretty close to the usual green and purple. It made for a beautiful contrast with the bright orange clownfish!

Less normal was this bleached out specimen, though the white and pastel purple-blue was so pretty. Equally pretty was the baby anemonefish taking shelter here.

We then got down to even more bleached anemone, with this little fella both wary and curious of the intruder with the lens.

The worst bits of bleaching hit the panda clownfish. Check out this poor shellshocked fish. My heart goes out to him.

This anemone is not normally white or even pretty fluorescent orange, it’s usually a dark orangey-brown, quite similar in colour to the pandas themselves.

It was really sad how they sat glumly in their bleached homes, not being able to change anemone because they were evolved to only live in one type.

I hope the bleaching has stopped and the anemone recovered by now.

A Quick Trip to Redang: Mourning the Coral

DC  and I went back to Redang to look up some friends for diving. We were there just as the coral bleaching broke out and were incredibly sad at the poor state of the coral. Global warming had taken its toll and the seas were unseasonably warm this time of the year. To upside was only for me as it was warm enough that I didn’t need to wear a wetsuit, the wuss that I am.

Our first dive was a bit of a shock. Whole patches of the coral had gone ghostly white and the patches stretched far and wide across the coralscape as far as the viz allowed us to see. It didn’t help that the water was a bit murky and the usually brightly coloured coral was completely washed out.

A lot of the hard coral was affected,, including the staghorn that was bleached from its usual tan to sickly yellow to dead white. It was an incredibly sad sight.

At some places, it wasn’t too bad, but we could already see the bleaching taking its toll on the outer edges. It was so depressing that the yellow sunflower coral that the other divers liked so much did nothing for me, looking to me as if they were pus-filled fungal colonies taking over the reef.

Yet, not all dive sites were affected. Only some areas hit by the worst conditions of warm water and unfavourable currents suffered badly. On other reefs, it seemed like life went on as normal, with only minimal bleaching that was hardly noticeable.

At some areas, I pretty much forgot that the bleaching situation was really bad – there was so much coral and fish life.

But the diving wasn’t always great. Somehow we ran into a lot of poor visibility, especially in the sandy areas where we saw this blue spotted stingray.

And this crocodile flathead, also in the sand.

Things got a little better on the coral itself where there were bigger fish like this grouper.

And on the coral were the pretty brown-banded pipefish that came in pairs, skittering over the reef with cautious movements.

The soft coral didn’t seem to be very much affected. It was healthy enough that this lionfish took refuge in it, peering placidly out from its sloe-eyes.

So all wasn’t quite lost as the reef didn’t seem to be all that dead. It appeared to be rebounding despite the dead patches. We were cheered as we continued our diving.