A Little Life

Take a close – really close – look at what lies beneath the water’s surface on a dive in Indonesia.

Words by Jobi Chan. Photographs by Sofi Sugiharto.

When I started diving, like most people, I liked to spot large animals such as turtles, sharks, manta rays and whale sharks. But after several years, I started to search for smaller creatures. Amongst these, my favourites are nudibranchs (pictured here), ghost pipefish, pygmy seahorses, flatworms and gobies. I particularly like to spot juvenile fish, such as oriental sweetlips and batfish, because the colours and patterns on their bodies are different from those of adults.

Indonesia is amazing for diving, with more marine diversity than anywhere else in the world. There are over 18,000 islands, with more than 600 types of coral and around 3,000 species of fish. I’ve dived all over, including Raja Ampat, Bali and Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. Manado, in North Sulawesi, is where most of these photographs were taken – it has the ideal conditions for finding the tiny inhabitants of the sea, such as this cyerce nigra, a type of shellless mollusc.

I can’t say any particular area of Indonesia is best, because it depends on what you want to see. You can go for a shallow dive in the calm Lembeh Strait and spot little creatures such as seahorses or nudibranchs. Or you can go to Raja Ampat for wobbegong sharks and walking (epaulette) sharks. If you enjoy cold water and deep sea, you can dive in Bali and wait for the giant sunfish to appear at around 30 metres or so.

This male jawfish was captured with his mouth stuffed full of eggs. Come breeding time, jawfish often use their jaws in courtship. Males try to show females that they have the biggest and mightiest jaws, because after she lays her eggs and he has fertilised them, it's up to him to look after them – and he does this by using his mouth as an incubator. The male picks up hundreds of eggs in his jaws, where he incubates them for a week or two before they hatch.

This is a flatworm pictured at night. I saw similar kinds of flatworms dancing during a night dive in Raja Ampat in December last year (2016). When people see them during a dive in the day, they are usually crawling or lying horizontal. But at night, they become active and hunt for small prey like waterflies. If you are lucky, you can see it dancing in the water, like in this photograph.

Clownfish are very attractive to beginner divers, because they’re easy to find in shallow water anemones, colourful and cute. This photograph tells a less cute, but fascinating story. The tongue-eating parasite, cymothoa exigua, which you can see here in this clownfish’s mouth, waits for a fish to swim past before shooting up from the ocean floor, through the gills and latching onto their host. The tongue of the host fish will eventually wither away and fall off, forcing the fish to use the attached parasite as a replacement.

The most common activity for a nudibranch, like the one pictured, is eating. They dedicate most of their time to it, spending approximately three to five hours a day inactive. They are mostly found on the ocean floor and move on a flat, broad muscle called a foot, which leaves a slimy trail. Some can swim short distances by flexing their muscles. They move at a speed of around ten metres per day.

If you go diving at a site many times, you may start to remember the locations of certain animals. For example, you might find a go by on a particular whip coral, a turtle in the cave in which it usually sleeps or maybe a string ray or garden eel on a patch of sandy ocean floor. A good guide will know the area well and will be able to show you all these special inhabitants of the ocean.

How do you learn to spot these minute animals of the ocean, such as this shrimp? Practice makes perfect and you will need to train yourself to develop an eagle eye. First, you need to be still in the water with neutral buoyancy. Then, simply take your time, breathing slowly, starting to look at each type of coral, searching for the small creatures that make their home here.

Jobi Chan (jobi@jacadatravel.com) is Jacada Travel’s resident diving expert and Hong Kong-based travel designer.

Sofi Sugiharto is a photographer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. See more of her photography on flickr.com (sofi_sugiharto).