Month: June 2016

What a mouthful! How not to inspect the inside of a conger eel’s mouth!

 

Conger after eating tompot blenny 1605
Small conger eel eating a large tompot blenny!

One of the tompot blennies living on a reef nearby recently came to a grizzly end in the mouth of this young conger eel. I don’t think it would have happened to me because, unlike this poor guy’s home, my crevice has a ‘bolt hole’. Let me explain what I mean by this; an ideal crevice home has a fairly open front part where female tompots can be entertained and encouraged to lay their eggs but it also has a very narrow back part where you can hide when a streamlined predator like a conger eel pays a visit. This ‘bolt hole’ also gives extra shelter when the sea is very rough.

 

Having said all that, this poor tompot blenny was very unlucky to meet a conger eel that was just small enough to get into his home and just large enough to eat him. You can see what a struggle it was for the conger in the first photograph. Paul, my underwater photographer, saw the tompot blenny stuck in the conger’s mouth like that for over 30 minutes! When Paul and Teresa came back 12 hours later, they found a very sleepy full-bellied conger eel and no tompot blenny!

This blog is being posted for children on the Wildlife Trusts Wildlife Watch website.

Wildlife Watch Benny the Blenny’s blog that site also has lots of other fun things to look at too.

The stunning view has now become green gloop!

Phyto-plankton bloom
Green gloop – phytoplankton bloom

AKA the phytoplankton (plant plankton) bloom, it’s as if the green curtains have come down! You can see in the photo below that when the sea is calm, I normally have a fantastic view from my crevice home, but it’s now like green fog (see the photo above)! It’s because the phytoplankton (millions of tiny plants living in the sea) have been growing and multiplying madly! Like the plants in your garden, they need the right conditions to grow. The seawater has now got a little warmer, there is enough light (the days are longer) for lots of photosynthesis and the right amount of nutrients are there so they go wild! These conditions happen every year in the spring, around the first week of May near Plymouth, and less dramatically in the autumn. My view might be spoilt but there is a big up-side to this phytoplankton bloom; lots of food for the zooplankton (animal plankton) to eat and then lots of them for other animals to eat! This all means that there will be plenty of food for my babies that are about to hatch from their eggs. See blog 27/08/2015. They will spend several weeks drifting with the plankton, eating the smaller zooplankton at first then moving onto the larger zooplankton as they grow up a bit.

 

When the green fog is here I have to use my sense of smell to find food as I can’t see very much! Hopefully it will all clear in the next couple of weeks and the divers will be able to come back to see how I’m getting on.

 

For more information about plankton take a look at http://www.lifeadrift.info

The view out of my window – a few weeks ago

The view from my crevice home, the large fish is a balloon wrasse.
The view from my crevice home, the large fish is a ballan wrasse.

For the first few weeks that I was looking after my growing raft of eggs, the view from my crevice home was stunning. I could see all the snakelocks anemones and thongweed gently swaying in the swell and several ballan wrasse (like the large fish in the photo) cruising around looking for crabs.