All my babes have now left my crevice home or ‘flown the nest’ as you like to say! I’m very proud of all my work because I was guarding eggs non-stop for nearly 4 months, keeping away all the ‘egg thieves’ (animals that might want to eat them) and caring for the eggs by wiping them over with my bulbous glands. Each batch of eggs takes about 2 months from being laid to hatching but, as we saw in my last blog, I had several batches! I’m keen to show you how wonderful they are closer up. This photo by Paul at the end of May showed that Belinda had just been laying the dark purple ones to the right of the picture. They were then the last to hatch in mid-July.
Now look at the eggs with obvious silver eyes at the front under Belinda’s eye, they were the most developed and were almost ready to hatch. In the middle, the gold coloured eggs were part way through their development and so had the different colouring. Can you see the amazing little cups they are laid in?
When the eggs hatch, the very small tompot blenny larvae swim up into the plankton and have to take their chances along with the young of many other sea creatures. Having batches that hatch at different times is a very good survival strategy for us tompot blennies. If one batch of our larvae get hit by bad weather or run into particularly voracious predators eating lots of plankton, there’s a good chance that the other batches will have an easier time.
I’m now looking forward to seeing as many as possible of my youngsters landing back on the reef after their tough time in the plankton!