Christmas trees and other water creatures, Christmas Eve 2005

Christmas Eve. "Jingle bells, jingle bells..." from distance creates a Christmas feeling. And I am looking for a christmas tree. For a long time I have been looking for them. Yesterday I finally found some of them but could not get close enough. Now on the Christmas Eve, I returned to search for more and found plenty of them. This time I could get closer and the visibility was better. They were so beautiful. I could not decide which one was the nicest. So at first I was swaying between them looking for the most perfect angle. They were in different colours.



Christmas trees (spirobranchus giganteus) are worms that live buried in coral and stick out their spiral formed colorful twin-tentacles for feeding on passing suspended particles and for respiration, but draw them in very quickly when distrubed.



The music from the restaurant on the beach continued - they were decorating for the Christmas Eve party. It was a sunny day and the tide was low so I could get a good view of the christmas trees below when floating in the calm sea over the coral reef. Sun created rainbows on the coral, see below.



Another interesting water creature are the clams, on Koh Tao I saw mostly deep blue ones. They too, are partly inside the coral with only their blue velvet looking "lips" visible (see above).



The first time when I saw a slingjaw wrasse (above) (epibulus insidiator) I thought the fish was injured because its white jaw was thrusted out of its mouth. It really looked weird. But then suddenly the jaw returned back to its place. And then I saw it happen again a bit later. The name of the fish indeed refers to its ability to protrude its mouth to capture prey. The mouth can be up to half the body length when the fish slings out its jaw.



Every time I was snorkeling I suddenly found myself in the middle of a large school of coral reef fish (above). There were many different sorts of fish, the common nominator was that they were eating coral. I could hear them biting the hard coral and the coral dust followed them where ever they went. It created an acquarel like atmosphere. They moved swiftly from place to place.



Further away in deeper water I found magic mountains with forests and fish flying over it:



When I returned to the beach, the hotel staff had finished the christmas decorations, and I find another christmas tree.