Off beaten track

Shards of living glass Dive any reef or wreck in Colombo and you will see them. Small shoals of shining glass fish, shining that is when the light hits them. They blink in and out of existence as the light hits them for a kaleidoscopic experience that is sometimes unreal, especially when they congregate in a huge shoal that engulfs you and surrounds you in small shards of sunlight. Glass fish on a reef Glass fish and cardinal fish on the Cargo wreck Usually the glass fish aren�t so spectacular, they hang around in a group of about a dozen close to any sort of crevasse on the reef or �caves� formed on wrecks by the structure of the sunken ship. Presumably they do this for shelter with a place to retreat to if a predator attacks. What they don�t seem to realize is that their shelter is most often where the attack is launched from. You don�t have to look too closely at the crevacess and cracks to see them. The groupers lie there innocuously, seemingly somnambulant. Blue line groupers are ...

One of my favourite spectacles underwater are the �bait balls,� conglomerations of small fish grouping together, tightly packed for protection from predators. These are especially common on the Cargo Wreck where thousands of fusiliers (Caesionidae) can be seen often in amorphous fluidity. Not exactly a bait ball, but a shoal of fusiliers heading past. Close up they are quite a beautiful fish They are especially prolific when there�s a bit of a current and some plankton in the water and while fascinating to watch by themselves, the action really starts when a few Bonito show up. These medium size tuna hunt in small packs of five to eight fish and are capable of simply jaw-dropping bursts of speed. There is nothing that can compare to the adrenaline rush you get watching these in action. I�d only seen these fish dead on a block of ice at a supermarket before I started diving so the speed and agility which these fish displayed was mind-blowing (I�m of course rapidly running out of super...