Reader Gayle Ferguson, you may recall, is a biologist at Massey University in Aukland, New Zealand (she once worked with Matthew in Manchester), and rescues batch after batch of orphaned kittens, for which she gets the title of Official Website Kitten Rescuer™. (One of the kittens she saved is Jerry Coyne the Cat.) She also does scuba diving, and took this photo of a camouflaged baby scorpionfish.
Gayle’s notes say “Photo taken on a scuba dive at the Poor Knights Islands off Tutukaka on the East Coast near Whangarei.”
Can you see it? It’s not terribly hard, but does show some nice camouflage:
Answer at 11 a.m. Chicago time.
Yes, I can see it. Won’t say just where (spoilers!) but it’s facing left and slightly up.
cr
I think I got it. Good one!
Talk about camouflage…if the military could blend in like this scorpion fish, well, the Green Berets could sneak up on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi disguised as a pile of desert rocks and end his evil life.
It’s damn near center stage.
I cannot see it, but I have swum over dozens of them and they are usually pretty easy to spot. This one is lucky to find such a matching habitat.
I agree: they are actually quite easy to see in the wild. I remember one sitting on coral sand. I suppose that it looked a bit like a lump of stray coral: obvious to us, but perhaps not to its potential prey.
This one was just a little baby. I was lucky to spot it!
Just right of center.
*Auckland
🙂
Umm? I’m in Auckland and Mr Fish isn’t.
Tutukaka is indeed east of Whangarei. Maybe 120 miles north of Auckland. So I suppose, ‘near Auckland’ to a first approximation, at least as seen from the other side of the planet.
cr
Oh, sorry, you meant Auckland vs ‘Aukland’. Quite correct. (Ain’t no Auks around here either, so far as I know)
cr