Blackwater diving is a drifting night dive in open water over deep ground, on a lit downline, looking at animals that rise towards the surface after dark with the vertical migration. The entries here are what a camera actually catches on those dives.
Most of it is transparent and most of it is small. The larval fish are unrecognisable as the adults they become: the leptocephalus that will be an eel, drifting flat as a leaf; the flounder larva still swimming upright with an eye on each side; the ribbonfish trailing fin rays four times its own length; the flying fish juvenile with the pectoral fins already spread years before it can use them. The crustacean larvae are the same story - the phyllosoma of a spiny lobster riding a jellyfish, the megalopa of a crab with adult eyes and claws on a body still built to swim.
The gelatinous animals are the other half of the dive, and most of them are not what they look like. Salps, doliolids, pyrosomes and larvaceans are tunicates, closer to a vertebrate than to a jellyfish; a siphonophore is not one animal but a colony of specialised clones swimming and hunting as a single body; a comb jelly is not a jellyfish and does not sting. Two entries are worth knowing for what lives on them: Phronima, which hollows out a salp and pushes the empty barrel through the water as a nursery, and the hyperiid amphipods, which ride and eat the jellies they live on.
The pelagic molluscs are the group's own set. Sea butterflies and sea angels are snails that gave up the seabed and swim on wings grown from the foot, one of them hunting the other; the heteropods turned the foot into a fin and the body into glass; Cephalopyge is a nudibranch that lives its whole life in open water and eats siphonophores. The squid here are mostly juveniles of deep-water species, and the glass squid is often no more in a beam than a pair of eyes and a gut.
The records are concentrated at Lembeh and Anilao, where boats run the dive regularly, with smaller sets from Ambon and Dauin. That is a fact about where the diving happens rather than about where the animals are.
Every one has a page. They are shown as a list rather than as pictures because nothing has been photographed or logged for them yet, and a species with nothing behind it should not sit in front of one that has.
How many of the 52 carry a record at each destination. A species usually carries several, so these do not add up to 52.
All 1316 species in one index, with filters for destination, rarity and hazard.
