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.
Not exact matches
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.
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).
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.
This is obviously very subjective, but the sites I enjoyed along the Dumaguete coast were the house reef in front
of Atmosphere and next door at Bahura, along with (place we saw the
jawfish etc).
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.
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.