Fluorescent colors of the reef - why corals need colors

   Corals, like many representatives of marine life, are known to be strikingly colourful creatures. However, understanding the nature of those colours can be tricky. The most problematic part: there's no such thing as colour outside your head. Light differs in wavelength and those differences can be picked up by various receptors in the eye. Colours, in contrast, are born in the secondary visual cortex in the brain after a lot of information is processed. The brain decides how to render the information from the retina based on the context of the whole image. In other words, there's no easy correspondence between wavelength and colour. Every photographer is familiar with this concept as part of white balance correction.

A fancy scorpionfish and some thoughts on photography of animals in captivity

This is a lacy scorpionfish (Rhinopias aphanes). It's extremely rare and I know only one diver with 5000+ logged dives who have seen this gorgeous creature in its natural habitat. I guess that makes me fortunate to be able to see it, at least in an aquarium.

Unfortunately for this psychedelic fish, its beauty makes it very desirable among aquarists. In addition, it is so confident in its perfect camouflage that it simply doesn't bother to hide and sits in the most visible place of the tank. Most likely it also doesn't try to hide in its natural environment either and divers just miss it.

Back from rainy Great Barrier Reef - some wildlife and macro/micro shots

    The Great Barrier Reef is renowned for amazing underwater sights... but the weather might seriously let you down. I spent most of the two-week long field trip indoors cursing the weather, yet managed to get a few shots.

The field trip took place at Heron island, which is a large coral cay. University of Queensland has a research station there.

Hydras fight for food

   Hydras and daphnias became a "classical" pair of predator and prey model of pond microscopic animals. However, what is often forgotten, hydras tend to aggregate together in high numbers. Usually, the encounter is not like one hydra vs one daphnia. It's a real mess! During warm days it's possible to spot hundreds of these tiny hungry monsters on a single leaf laying underwater. Inevitably, they start competing for food. In this post I'll show how two hydras fight for a single water flea. Unlike in my other posts, the photographs are not made through the microscope. I tried Canon MP-E mounted on 7D for videography purposes, but made lots of stills during my project. May be these pictures will not impress you after previous hydra posts (1,2) but they show natural behavior.