While large coral heads are sparse here in shallow water, there is a sandy bottom, where many lively
yellowhead jawfish poke their heads out of holes in the coral rubble.
Dolphins, manta rays, reef sharks, giant trevallies, mobula rays circling the boat lights at night, a brooding
jawfish with a mouthful of eggs, pygmy seahorses, frogfish, ghost pipefish, very healthy reef fish life and innumerable crustaceans and invertebrates.
Large crabs will go after bottom - dwelling fish species, such
as jawfish, gobies, blennies and sculpins.
If you display a nice group of Moorish idols or an Achilles tang, or maybe a bed of garden eels or colony
of jawfish, it will get attention.
If you're lucky you may find turtles, nurse sharks and
giant jawfish resting in the dark recesses of the tunnel, but always you will find a school of curious looking glassy sweepers just before the tunnel exit at 100ft (30m).
This area hosts mantis shrimps and the endemic blue - spotted
Andaman jawfish.
Turtles, eagle rays and yellow -
headed jawfish are regularly seen on this dive.
On the sand floor, yellowheaded
jawfish float nervously over their burrow holes.
The sandy bottom surrounding the hole features small fish such as
banded jawfish, seminole gobies and tobacco fish.
Ghost pipefish, octopus, sea snakes, Frogfish big, small, painted, angry,
jawfish with eggs, cardinal fish with eggs, sea horses... it's all there.
It is good for pelagic encounters and taking wide angle photographs with a huge sand flat that is home to garden eels and
yellowhead jawfish.
On the flip side, you should keep very few fish in small invert tanks, sticking mainly to items like gobies, blennies, dottybacks,
jawfish, basslets, etc..
In the meantime, marine divers are now collecting those miniature fish that they already knew about but never figured were worth anything: shrimp gobies (with their commensal shrimp), crabs that live in the spines of sea urchins, fish that live in the body cavity of sea cucumbers and
jawfish and garden eels that live in the substrate.
As well as hundreds of strange and wonderful tiny critters, you can see flamboyant gobies and cuttlefish,
jawfish, the more unusual leaffish, grey frogfish and ghost pipefish, hawkfish, crocodilefish and of course, many colourful mandarinfish which give this site its name.
Some of the smaller species that you can see are
jawfish, which is an endemic species to the Similan Islands, and purple and red fire gobies.