Under The Med Sea. Mid August 2022

Under the Med Sea continues! Sharing what’s under the sea just metres from the beach. If you look there’s magic everywhere, you just have to have some Roald Dahl magic in you.

With just a month of beach season to go, perhaps my obsession with being in the sea as much as possible increased. Days were getting shorter, the sun setting sometimes within 30 minutes of making the beach. Of course the fish were getting more active as the sun set with little good light making grainy photos. I found better camera settings around mid August and getting there early I got better light. Early mid August photo graininess wasn’t going anywhere.

female Rainbow wrasse/Coris julis and I think a Giant goby/*Gobius cobitis*

That doesn’t stop me sharing them! I just want to share the underwater world people rarely think about or see when they go to a non tropical beach or for a swim. Just meters from the shore is an alien world where most fish happily live along side each other. I think it’s out in the deeper sea, life gets more eat or be eaten except for plankton. Plankton get eaten by nearly everything in the sea

Can you believe nature makes these colours?! Ornate wrasses are like fluorescent, iridescent blues, greens, yellows and purples like fly wings.

I didn’t believe at first such colours existed!

I think Two banded sea bream/*Diplodus vulgaris*

I think this is a two banded sea bream with an extra blue head. There were a few similar and hang around with the regular two banded sea breams.

I only saw one of these last year! Giants compared to the rest of the sea breams.

I think Striped red mullets/*Mullus surmuletus*. They’re so fun to watch. All they care about is finding food, non stop foraging zig zagging all over the sea floor and rocks.

Damselfish are either solitary or live in huge schools. There was a resident damselfish I always looked out for that that often said hi. One near sunset snorkel, a massive school of damselfish appeared from nowhere to loop the rocks and head back out. I never saw as bigger school before. There’s something about damselfish I like. Maybe it’s their shade of blue or how they swim gliding through the water.