A female spinecheek anemonefish (Premnas biaculeatus) poses for the camera. Actually, she was moving all over the place, and I tried to get a couple of pictures in as quickly as I could. This is a large anemonefish (up to about 16 cm long) in a different genus than the others I encountered. (Inglis Shoal, Kimbe Bay)
A lateral view of the same female spinecheek anemonefish. (Inglis Shoal, Kimbe Bay)
A female spinecheek anemonefish in her home on a previously un-named reef (near Numundo) that I call 'Elizabeth's Reef.' This reef — another inshore reef not far from Walindi — has great vertical relief and among the fishes that I saw were large Spanish mackerels and eagle rays (neither of which I expected to find so close to shore). (Elizabeth's Reef, Kimbe Bay)
Spinecheek anemonefish on a seamount near Madang. We had already seen quite a few of these symbiotic damselfishes elsewhere but found this one because its anemone (bulb-tipped anemone, Entacmaea quadricolor) was such a brilliant red — even at the significant depth at which it occurred — that we were drawn from quite a distance to check it out. We confirmed with Shane Ritchie, who then ran Jais Aben Resort's dive operation, that the anemone was — somehow — red, and that we weren't suffering a two-person hallucination. Upon developing my slides, though, I found that the anemone appeared the same green as all the others of its species had been. I was tipped off to the answer, months after my return, when I read of a fluorescent anemone described in a National Geographic tribute article to Jacques Cousteau (who died in 1997, while I was in PNG): this anemone, when it occurs at depth, supposedly fluoresces. The anemone's red fluorescence would explain both the anomaly of its preternatural brightness at depth and why (overwhelmed by the light from my strobes) that red didn't register on my film. To put things right, here is an idea of how it really looked, at least to our eyes, thanks to the magic of Adobe Photoshop. (Planet Rock, Madang)
Spine-cheeked anemonefish, again...this is the same individual. (Planet Rock, Madang)
One more of this large anemonefish. (Planet Rock, Madang)
As is true of other anemonefish species, male spinecheeks are smaller than the female. When the female dies, a male anemonefish has its chance to assume her gender and her dominant role in the anemone. To find out more about anemonefishes, you might want to take a look at this impressive reference produced by experts on the subject. (Restorf Island, Kimbe Bay)
A male spinecheek anemonefish gets a look at the wider world of its island reef. (Restorf Island, Kimbe Bay)
Male and female spinecheek anemonefish. This pair were in a bleached anemone — like corals, anemones can suffer loss of their symbiotic zooxanthellae. (Elizabeth's Reef, Kimbe Bay)
A male-female pair of spinecheek anemonefish on their bleached bulb-tipped anemone on a seamount. (Inglis Shoal, Kimbe Bay)
There is no direct evidence that small fishes that are the subjects of an underwater photographer's attention suffer any loss of fitness as a result (possibly only because demonstrating such a correlation would be tough) but photographers who harry a subject to the extreme or place it in direct danger, perhaps by moving it to a more aesthetically-pleasing spot, can have obvious and sometimes immediate effect on an animal's future prospects. I usually try to miminize my impact on the animals I'm trying to photograph, as much as is possible given the horrendous visual and auditory impact inherent to all divers, and would much rather have a badly-composed, backscatter-ridden shot of a unique subject than the same subject in a beautiful setting but with the knowledge that I moved it there. This may explain some of the less pristine shots that I've put up on the Web! That's my excuse, anyway, and I'm sticking with it... (Inglis Shoal, Kimbe Bay)
A female spinecheek on her dark red anemone, perched atop a nearshore reef. (Elizabeth's Reef, Kimbe Bay)
Another view of the same anemonefish. (Elizabeth's Reef, Kimbe Bay)
A female spinecheek anemonefish. Many large females of this strikingly-colored species have the usually-white vertical bands in shades of grey (sometimes very close to black). (Restorf Island, Kimbe Bay)
This female spinecheek was in a dark red anemone (not an obviously fluorescing one, in this case) and herself was shaded quite darkly. The overall visual result was quite stunning, underwater, but all that darkness makes for a photo that's a bit...well...dark. I've seen a few of these dark spinecheek anemonefish in dark red (to almost black, even in shallow water where red light still penetrates) anemones and have found that the overall visual effect generally works a lot better in person. (Ann Sophie's, Kimbe Bay)
One more of the same anemonefish, still looking pretty dark. Whether it has darkened to more closely match the color of the anemone would be an interesting question to investigate. (Ann Sophie's, Kimbe Bay)
A small male spinecheek in the dark red mass of the same anemone. (Ann Sophie's, Kimbe Bay)