Since 2016, Rich Collins has been plunging into the pitch-black waters off the coast of Palm Beach, Florida, at night, camera in hand, in pursuit of blackwater photography. These nighttime dives have given him a unique window into the lives of sea creatures, including many that usually stay hidden in deeper waters, but come up to the surface after dark to feed. One thing Collins and his fellow divers have observed over the years is that some juvenile fish interact with larval tube anemones in interesting ways, with the fish either sticking close to the anemones or even carrying them around. These “symbiotic associations” are described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Fish Biology, for which Collins was a co-author. “The bradmids [pomfret fish] tend to surf on them [anemones] or ride them, or they grab them with their pectoral fins,” Collins, a diver affiliated with the Florida Museum of Natural History, told Mongabay. “The filefishes tend to grab things with their mouths and carry them around.” Blackwater images of these associations, taken in the epipelagic waters of both Florida and French Polynesia, found their way to Gabriel Afonso, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “They’re beautiful photos,” Afonso told Mongabay. “People like them, but researchers look to them with different eyes — we look to them as a source of information.” Drawing from the photos, Afonso and his co-authors described the “mutualistic interaction” between open-water fish —…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed