They are a juvenile stage of the Smooth Trunkfish.
Perfectly round like a marble but very tiny… perhaps the size of the fingernail on your pinky finger.
They are, it would seem, territorial so they don’t cover a lot of ground. But their movements are abrupt and they are tiny… so getting a pixture of one in sharp focus can be as much luck as skill.
At first glance they look pretty ordinary. Not a lot of difference in color from the sand they sit on and kind of scruffy. In fact, I was thinking abandoned by the original tenant and perhaps the future home of a really big Hermit Crab.
And then a couple of things caught my attention.
There are sometimes tracks across the sand that lead right to these shells… and occasionally one of these “abandoned shells” would hop forward a few inches.
So I and my camera slowed down and got in close like we like to do. That is when I noticed that pretty much everyone of these shells had an eyeball that was looking at me.
A pretty special eyeball really… as it is on the end of a long tube. Giving the owner the ability to reach out from under the shell to see what’s going on in the world around them.
The good news is that we had two great dives today. We went shallow in deference to the strong current and had lots of critters to shoot.
The bad news is that my strobe problem has grown to the point where almost all the pixtures I’m getting have unusable lighting.
Did see a large turtle today, who was happy to let me get in very close… so I was able to correct for my lighting issue in post production and salvage this pixture.
Our 2nd dive today brought us the 2nd one of this trip.
Today’s find was orange/red, perhaps just a little bit smaller than the first of this trip.
He was well hidden amongst the soft corals that he clung too… but was very patient while all 8 of us jockeyed for a look and some pixtures.
Very near the end of our deep dive, my most excellent dive buddy, Miss Lydia… worked her spotter magic yet again.
The pixture above is the Reef Squid that she spotted w/ his camouflage on.
The one below is the same guy after he moved enough for me to get the blue water behind him.
But the famous Cozumel current did give me one memorable pix.
On our way thru the swim-thru… it gave my dive buddy some pretty cool Medusa hair.
Our 2nd dive this morning was #800 for me.
But even better than that Linda got to see a seahorse.
This is the girl who regularly spots things smaller than your thumbnail… and can take you back to the same spot tomorrow, to find it again.
But try as she might, she has never been lucky with the seahorses… this being only her 3rd one in 520 dives.
If have dove here, you need to know, Cozumel is all about the drift diving. We all jump off the boat descend and ride the current to see what we can see.
If you or your gear aren’t ready to go on that first morning of diving… you are most definitely a giant pimple on the ass of progress.
To avoid being that person… we like to do a check out dive from the shore whenever we can.
Today was that dive. Beyond checking out ourselves and our scuba stuff our expectations were pretty low.
But to our delight, we saw a number of small and interesting creatures… including this Golden Moray.
