The 45-day Wetpixel Ultimate Indonesia expedition is well underway. We spent 6 days diving our brains out in Lembeh Strait, and are now aboard the Seven Seas liveaboard vessel exploring Halmahera. Yesterday, we dove in a mangrove channel near Obit Island in Southern Halmahera. I had planned on taking the day off to let my ears recover after 11 days of intense diving, but the group came back from the first dive, reporting a huge population of flasher wrasse in mere meters of water. I had to go see it for myself. At around 4pm, I dropped into the shallows and spent an hour watching over a dozen male flasher wrasse competing with each other in courtship behavior amongst their many harems of females.

As their names suggest, male flasher wrasses “flash” their ornate fins and intensify their colors as they zoom around trying to coerce a single female to swim up the water column to spawn. Because their movements are so erratic during courtship, these hyper little fish are very difficult to photograph!

We think that this particular flasher wrasse might be a color variation of the filamented flasher, Paracheilinus filamentosus. Most of the individuals I photographed share the “deep lunate tail with filamentous lobes” as described in fish ID books.

I wish I could send higher-resolution images, but this Iridium satellite connection makes it quite impossible.

Wetpixel still has a couple spots open for part II of Ultimate Indonesia (March 25 - April 9: Ambon, the Banda Sea, and Maumere). For more information, check out http://wetpixel.com/ultimateindo.