The first dive is a disappointment. Grey-black sand running down a slope, a few sticks of rubble, visibility closing at eight metres. Nothing to photograph, and nowhere for anything to live.
Then the guide stops over a patch of sand no different from any other patch of sand, and waits.
What came out of that sand across twelve days was a jawfish holding a mouthful of eggs so far along you could count the eyes in them. A cardinalfish with a clutch in its jaw. A peacock mantis shrimp carrying a pink egg mass in her forelimbs. A goby guarding its young inside a bottle somebody threw off a boat. Five species, all of them raising something.
That is not luck. On a slope with no coral, no crevice and nowhere to hide, an animal that wants its eggs to survive has to carry them itself. Dauin looks empty because everything on it is occupied with being invisible. Learn to see one thing here and the sand stops being sand.
