What the Fish? Enjoy!

Spawning coral turns sea pink

Ah, Wednesday. Mid-week. Hump day.

The perfect day to squander your lunch hour viewing videos of coral reefs.

This clip of spawning corals is from BBC News. If you check the video credit, however, the footage actually comes "courtesy of Reefvid.org."

Oh really ...

... well, I have a 60-minute lunch so of course I checked out the site and watched, like, 6 more videos. Most of the stuff I searched for—clown, blue tang, giant clam—came up with at least one watchable video snippet.

Alas, the time has come for me to clock back in. If you find any cool videos you want to share, comment with a link so we can check 'em out later.

Happy hump day!

Fish Fight! Enjoy!

Star Clownfish

The marketing department recently lost one of our two clownfish.

I say "lost" because we searched high and low for her carcass but came up empty-handed (literally).

Our remaining clownfish eventually healed from the stress and disease plaguing our tank and emerged a different fish.

The first noticeably different change is new, darker coloring around the spinous dorsal. The second, more interesting, change we've observed is that he's seemed to have chosen the star polyps in our sand bed as a host.

We had an anemone in the tank before that the clowns didn't take to and later acquired some frogspawn they were not particularly fond of either.

I wonder if, in the absence of the "alpha" clown, this little guy felt he needed a host to be safe.

Any thoughts?

Attack of the Giant Sea Scorpions!

For a second there, you might've thought this was a review about some long-lost sci-fi film from the 50s.

Well, think again.

British scientists announced on Tuesday that they've discovered a fossil claw in Germany belonging to the biggest bug ever known.

Yahoo! News picked up the story by way of the Associated Press and have a short film clip to accompany the article. Not to be outdone, National Geographic ran their own version of the story; both were released November 21.

In case you were wondering (or worried), we don't mention marine stories such as this in our blog because we've run out of ideas for fresh content.

We just figure you're probably interested in the same stuff we are, so we figure it doesn't hurt to provide a link. It's good to think outside the box (or aquarium, as it were) once in a while.

Octopus Kills Shark

I stumbled across this video earlier today on National Geographic's website and couldn't resist sharing it with you. I didn't see a way to easily embed the footage into our blog so I just took a screenshot and hyperlinked it back to NG.

While you're there, you might as well check out some other movies, like the Octopus Escape clip: it shows a 600-pound (272-kilogram) octopus shape-shifting itself to wriggle through a passageway the size of a quarter!