Nobody found this animal in the sea.
It is seven millimetres long, shorter than a grain of rice, and it wears the skin of the coral it lives on: the same pink, the same knobbled surface, the same habit of holding still while the current moves everything else. For as long as people had been diving these reefs, they had swum past it.
In 1969 a scientist in New Caledonia lifted a sea fan into his laboratory to study the fan, and under the lamp found two seahorses gripping its branches. The species was named after him the following year. Every one seen since has been found by somebody who knew which fan to search, and then searched it.
This one held a single branch in a surge that was moving the whole fan. The light is a narrow beam from one strobe, aimed so that the coral behind falls to black and the animal stands on its own. It never does in life. That is the point of the picture.
A pygmy seahorse against black water, Bangka.
$150Sizes belowChoose a size
Prices in US dollars; shipping is a flat $25 to Canada and the United States. Printed to order and shipped from Canada. Framing is not offered: shipping glass across a border is a bad idea for everyone.
Eight lines from the dive
Photographed in Bangka Archipelago
Postage is by the tube, not the sheet
Postage is the largest single cost in a print order, and it is charged by the tube. A second print travels in the same one.
