Oh, what a dive that was! Fort Wetherill delivered once again!
Since the first time the weird translucent larval creatures cartwheeling in front of my lights were identified as mantis shrimp I have been obsessed with them and I have been looking for a normal sized one. Soon I learned that mantis shrimp are tough to find, you can find the holes but they are very shy, understandably so because they look so meaty 😀
I had low key accepted defeat but out of nowhere this mantis shrimp appeared under my light. It totally looked manic, from the body language I could tell that it was aggressively looking for something. It was getting more aggravated as me and my buddy kept our lights on it, and kept flashing our strobes. Finally it found what it was looking for, its hole. Poor creature found its hole and jumped right in it and could finally take a deep breath – or whatever mantis shrimp do 🙂
Once you see a mantis shrimp for the first time in a dive everything else seems less interesting. But, even without that little guy it would be a great dive because there were the tropicals, larval stage fish and weird creepy crawlies squirming in the water column and the first seahorse I could find this season. All of those by themselves would have made this dive totally worth it, but now, “oh yeah, there was also a seahorse” 😀
27ft, 132min, 67F
