True Colors Thursday... Yellow

There are loads of yellow fish in the sea, but as you may recall I am not really into fish so I don't take pictures of them. This guy is an exception though. It is a three-spot damselfish and this one happens to be a juvenile. When they grow up they are brownish grey with 3 yellow spots. I have tons of pics of these guys but mostly because they are in the way when I am taking pictures of my beloved Elkhorn Coral. The adults are quite a nuisance and extremely territorial. They build a little farm of algae on the coral by biting it over and over again until it dies and algae grows in its place. When you get close to their farm they will try to scare you off and even bite you!

This is another juvenile that has beautiful yellow stripes and will be a french or maybe a grey angelfish when it grows up.
There is a coral called 'Mustard Hill coral' that is yellow. It can have a greenish or brownish tone to it but often it is bright bright yellow! In this picture, part of the colony is white because it has died very recently. This is all too common and something we attribute to disease but we really do not know why it happens or how to stop it in spite of a lot of work! It is a big part of the reason our reefs are dying.


Another problem for some corals (especially my beloved Elkhorn coral) is this coral-eating snail! It is sort of hard to see what is going on in this pic but there is 1 snail on top of a larger one that is flipped over. The body or foot of this specific coral-eating snail is bright yellow and it spits out egg cases that are a golden yellow color filled with hundreds of larvae!

Here I am hard at work on the reef. Yellow is a good color to have underwater because it is easily visible so that is why I like to wear a bright yellow snorkel. Our transect tapes are yellow and in this case my weights are yellow (they are loaners though, normally I stick to black which is more slimming ;-))

A year ago I lived in a yellow submarine! Well, not quite a submarine since it is attached to the seafloor but it is an underwater marine station called Aquarius! It was pretty amazing to spend 8 days underwater.

Moose and I looked everywhere for something of his that was yellow and when I told him he could not be in this post without it he agreed to don his old bumble bee halloween costume. He complained bitterly as you can hear in the video!











This meme is hosted by Blue, and next week's color is violet. I will try to come up with some pics that are a little more interesting for next week. These are all pretty blah (except for the ones of Moose!)!