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Visit the Forgotten Islands, Alor and Komodo on the Arenui in April & May, 2023

April 11-19, 2023: There is one remaining cabin available for this 8 night cruise through the Forgotten Island, beginning and ending in Saumlaki.

April 21-May 2, 2023: There is one remaining cabin available for this 11 night cruise through the Forgotten Islands and Alor, beginning in Saumlaki and ending in Maumere.

May 4-15, 2023: There is one remaining cabin and a single female shared cabin available on this 11 night cruise through Alor and Komodo, beginning in Maumere and ending in Labuanbajo.

Reef ID Books Releases Guide to Marine Worms

This book is full of creatures that are weird and wonderful - marine worms! Some of them look like nightmares or aliens from outer space, others look like beautiful flowers. You have never seen most of them. Many are not yet known to science. The author and his friends - underwater photographers and marine biologists were lucky to find many fantastic beasts - a variety of marine worms.

Copepods are a group of small crustaceans found in nearly every freshwater and saltwater habitat. Some species are planktonic.

Plankton doesn't eat microplastic

Finally, a bit of good news. Well, sort of. It is not good that plastic finds its way into our oceans and can be detected in just about every sample of water but at least it appears that microplastics do not accumulate in the aquatic food chain.

Why damselfish chasing away cleaner fish's customers is bad for reefs

Many of us are familiar with the scenes at cleaning stations, where cleaner fish and cleaner shrimp feed on the parasites and dead tissues of their “clients.”

Under normal circumstances, sharknose gobies (Elacatinus evelynae) would set up a cleaning station at a coral reef, and use it as a base to attend to their “clients”—usually the parrotfish, surgeonfish, butterflyfish, etc— by eating the parasites and dead body tissue off their client's skin, fins and mouth. 

However, at reefs with damselfish, things are not always so peaceful.