This small Lemon Drop Damsel found a pleasant, color-coordinated home amidst the branches of a black coral.

Two Speckled Flatworms (Pseudobiceros bajae) Speckled flatworms in the Sea of Cortez. Flatworms like to glide over the reef, searching out food and romantic partners, in tropical seas. Although well suited to that lifestyle, they lack all body cavities, nor respiratory or circulatory systems. They do posess bilateral symmetry, and head and tail ends. The Baja Peninsula gives Speckled Flatworms their species name: bajae, of "of Baja". I like the way their speckles twist and ch

A panamic green moray (Gymnothorax castaneus) gazes into a school of mysid shrimp (Mysida). Mysid shrimp live in salt and fresh water throughout the world, at all temperatures. These were in the Sea of Cortez, in the Bahia de los Angeles, in water at 87F. The females carry their larvae offspring in pouches, giving them the name "opossum shrimp". Like their second cousins, krill, they are filter feeders on even smaller creatures, and are an important food source for larger, b

Scorpionfish (Scorpionidae) This scorpionfish was relaxing on the bottom at Piedra Partida, a dive site at Danzante Island in the Sea of Cortez. Danzante Island lies in the Parque Nacional Bahía de Loreto, a spectacular reserve covering nearly 800 square miles of ocean and uninhabited islands. The Scorpionfish family is widespread throughout the Pacific and contains many species organized into several subfamilies and many genera. I am not sure of the species: several species