420 Dive Log Australasia OCTOBER 2026

A Marine Naturalist goes to Lembeh part 2 I spent many years teaching scuba diving. Imagine if two young men in their twenties, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace enrolled in my Open Water Class. I always did the ‘Pool Sessions” in the sea at Bass and Flinders Bay at Cronulla, a fully protected safe water where you could stand in one metre of water and gradually dive down to four metres; no chlorinated pools for me. So, on day one, we encountered fish and marine life. We actually saw baby Flathead, tiny Pygmy Leatherjackets and Nudibranchs on training dive one. We also saw a bright red fish, the Black Banded Perch a relative of ‘tropical” fish like the Queensland Groper.

Picture Charles and Alfred observing during the dive between training exercises and making careful observations. Wow! That Pygmy Leatherjacket is hiding in the bright green sea grass. How come it is exactly the same colour? That tiny baby Flathead blends in with the sand perfectly. Notice the flattened body is adapted to burying itself in sand. Those sponge crabs have ten legs and hide into rock crevices.

After the dive, they asked me about the marine life. Being landlubbers, they were not familiar with basic fishy things like, some fish can change their colour and some have day and night colours. So, I was able to explain basic Marine Biology to them, stuff that most Aussies see all the time at the beach. As you would expect, both of them were fixated on my every word and absorbed as much knowledge as they could. Then, they began

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Dive Log Australasia #420 October ’26

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