Brandon Cole is with STARSHIP for a few weeks in his capacity as a professional photographer, to document some of the marine life we encounter on this leg of the voyage on film, while Michael concentrates on video. Brandon is also something of a ‘guru’ on marine biology, he can usually answer any difficult questions we hit him with! Michael and Brandon were looking for a White bulb-tipped Anemone, which really show off the bright colours of their attendant Anemone fish, but as they had no luck, we didn’t hang around at Boirama for a second dive.

Next ‘port of call’ was ‘Jason’s Reef’, which actually had a mooring block, a great idea as heavy anchors do a lot of damage to coral reefs…it is good to see such measures being put in place to protect the reef environment here. The only problem was, the mooring wasn’t buoyed, so Peo, who knew the reef, had to dive for 30 minutes to find it before we could tie on!

Trevor, Enrico and I dived this one and enjoyed it. A nice reef wall dropping down to 35 meters, some beautiful hard and soft corals, and lots of fish! We even saw a little reef shark about 5ft long, but unfortunately he didn’t hang around. Still there was plenty else to catch our attention.

There were several Clown Triggerfish cruising around like mobile Picasso paintings, the occasional Spotted boxfish, and a couple of Unicorn fish which are really strange looking. They have a ‘nose’ like the character Pinocchio! I also stopped to film a large ‘Many-spotted Sweetlips’ (what a name for a fish!) … who was being cleaned by a couple of small wrasse ... yet another example of ‘symbiosis’. Symbiotic relationships come in three different forms; mutualism, when both species involved benefit from the relationship; commensalism, when one species benefits and the other isn’t affected; and parasitism, when one species benefits, and the other is harmed in some way.

Porcelain Crab.

Sometimes it is hard to figure out exactly what type of relationship it is you are observing on the reef. To use the example of the Sweetlips and the cleaner wrasse, the Sweetlips is getting rid of its parasites, and the cleaner wrasse is getting a ‘feed’, so this would be a mutualistic relationship. Still on the subject of symbiosis (nearly finished!) on our next and final site for the day, the bay in front of Bunama village on Normanby Island, Michael filmed a beautiful little Porcelain crab on a large green Stichodactyla’ anemone. (I have to throw in the odd Latin name, it makes me feel smart!) This is more of a commensalistic relationship, the crab gets shelter and protection from the anemone, but the anemone neither benefits nor is harmed by the relationship, as least as far as we know at present.

Lou with Tallimon listening to the minidisc recording of the singsing.

Enough on critters and diving, it is evening now, and while I am writing this, Enrico is cooking us another of his awesome meals, and Trevor has taken Michael, DJ, Peo, James, and Lou ashore to Bunama village for another ‘Sing sing’. Tonight James is going to try and record their singing to MiniDisc.

The children of Bunama sang their hearts out. It was incredible. We loved it so much much we thought we would share the experience with all of you. You will need a mp3 player to listen to this audio file. If you don't have one you can download one FREE from http://www.winamp.com If/when you have a player simply click on the 'STARSHIP MP3 FILE' button to begin the download (approx 350kB).