If you look closely at rock walls or hard substrates while diving on the NE coast of England, you'll probably see these small anemones... they are usually only a centimeter or two wide, and without a torch are easy to miss amidst the dead-mans fingers, urchins, and encrusting sponges. They can be very colorful, but that is a detail easily overlooked in the murk at 20 meters down.
Most of the anemone is actually stuffed into a crack in the rocks giving them a much flatter profile than the Plumose anemones (Metridium senile) that can be found nearby. The cracks can be quite narrow... compare for example the size of the 'head' and the width of the cracks in the image below.
So what are they? Well... thats a bit hard to say. They are almost certainly in the family Sagartiidae, and probably Sagartia ornata, but could also be small Sagartia elegans. The small size makes me think the former, but this is not an easy group to identify from photographs alone. Short of returning with a crowbar or a rock hammer to dig them out, the best I can do is appreciate the beautiful effect they have on the underwater surfaces.
It happens to everyone... your cruising along at 18 meters through the pea soup that passes for ocean water in the North Atlantic when suddenly you spot a few colorful fish in your beam, darting in and out of the sea weed...
... or maybe its just a single fish, examining you from the security of a rock cleft....
... or possibly its a discoloration of the sand, that swims away as you pass over (after a bit of prodding with your torch, anyway)
You reach for your handy guide to the fish of the northern Atlantic waters (in my case a 40 year old copy of Collins Guide to Sea Fishes) and ignoring the difficult interactions of paper with water at depth, you flip to the appropriate page and quickly realize that you are seeing....
... well, no, actually, its not that clear... The difficulty of many of these fish guides is that they make a few assumptions about your situation, namely that you are viewing the fish from the side, in good light, on the surface, while the fish in question sits perfectly still with its fins outstretched. The pictures in the guides vary from black and white sketches (not good if the obvious difference between species is color pattern), paintings (often taken from dead and slightly faded fish) or pictures of pickled specimens. It gets worse if you go to the technical literature... Handbook of the Marine Fauna of North-West Europe is one of the best books for identifying UK sea life, but unless you regularly take a dissecting microscope and a jug of formaldehyde on your dive trips its not going to be much use (who can count fin rays at depth, anyway?) I have a personal rule about collecting live specimens (that is, I won't) so I'm limited to either a photograph or a short movie clip taken under what I would politely call less than ideal conditions.
Fortunately, there seems to be more sea life publications written by divers for divers in recent years, with photos taken from life rather than illustrations or images of dead specimens. Without such aids, I would have been hard-pressed to identify either of these fish, as they belong to the Gobies, one of the more difficult fish groups.
The species, incidentally, are female Two-Spotted Gobies and a lone Common Goby.
The spanish have a reputation for being friendly, and that seems to extend to their shrimp.... these small shrimp on Tabarca Island are happy to be hand-fed pieces of bread.
Of course, not all were so friendly... this one tried to 'attack' the camera.
Diving the british coast can be an amazing experience, with a diversity of life unlike anything you'll find in the tropics. You just have to be willing to brave cold waters, bad weather, and a visibility measured in inches instead of meters.
This weekend I was at St. Mary's Lighthouse, north of Newcastle. This is how the tourists see St. Mary's:
and this is how I saw it:
Probably due to the shallowness of the dive site and the proximity of a sandy beach, there was not as much life as at places farther north up the coast, but there were still crabs, lobsters, turban snails, and sea anemones. The high point of the dive was finding a small blenny curled in an S shape, hoping not to be noticed, then darting off when it realized it had an audience! The low point (or sad point, really) was coming across a large lobster trapped in an abandoned lobster pot... if I had thought to bring a dive knife I could have cut it free, but as it was, I had to leave it behind. There something about seeing these large, beautiful crustaceans when they are alive and in their native habitat that makes it seem like such waste to trap and eat them.
The visibility in the water was too poor for most of my attempts at photography, but I did manage a short film clip of a crab scuttling away from us. It also gives you a bit of an idea of the visibility I had to deal with. Getting lost was a constant risk, even with a compass, and we had to surface several times just to figure out where we were!
