I was taking a picture of a turtle scratching on a rock when our dive guide came over to me and made some very emphatic hand signals at me and motioned for me to follow. When we arrived, I figured out what his hand signals meant - this pair of colorful lettuce were mating! The photo was tricky to capture because they were in a cut between the rocks with quite a bit of surge.
The beautiful opalescent nudibranch (Hermissenda opalescens), one of the most colorful species of sea slug, filmed off the coast of California by Aron Sanchez-Baranda.
A small selection of the pictures from Sunday's dive near Ammouliani with @vivia. First dive of the year but it was already surprisingly warm! 23°C and sunny, 18°C surface water temperature and still 16°C at 25m depth. We saw a lot of interesting animals.
Featuring: a yellow nudibranch (phyllidia flava) grazing on seaweed next to red finger sponge, a painted comber swimming on top of rocks covered with some black sponge, a biscuit sea star in a little cave surrounded by colorful sponges, and in the top-left a nudibranch ("sea cow", peltodoris atromaculata) and some yellow sea anemones, and last but not least two starfishes, one red one with five arms and another orange one that once had six arms plus some bonus mermaid's cup at the bottom.