ANIMALWATCH
Costal Town of Dauin
Dauin is a small coastal town in the Visayas on the Island of Negros Oriental. The coast of Dauin offers excellent scuba diving with both coral reef and muck dive opportunities. The municipality has established several sanctuaries, within which fishing and boating is absolutely prohibited. These sites are well preserved and offer a huge variety of Marine life.
Apo Island in also part of the municipality of Dauin. This Island is one of the country’ s top dive sites but mainly for its lush coral gardens, turtles and schooling Jacks. Not so much for the small critters.
There are flights twice a day from Manila to Dumaguete with both Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific. Dumaguete to Dauin is an easy
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30-minute ride away. Orientwind Travel and Tours
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BOHOL offers all sorts of trips around this region including dive trips to the muck slopes of Dauin or the
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coral gardens of Apo Island. Two local dive shops, Snoopy’ s Scuba Ventures and Glenn Carbello’ s Diveworx offer expert advice, PADI dive courses and guides. If you want to stay in the most luxurious place right on the beach visit www. atmosphereresorts. com. tiful as the Harlequin shrimp is, its feeding habits are quite brutal. It is built to feed on live starfish. It has a scissor like claw with a saw blade on the bottom that it uses to cut pieces of its prey, the starfish can still keep on growing so the shrimp tries to keep it alive and keep feeding on it.
Another bizarre critter is the Mantis shrimp. This is not really a shrimp but looks and behaves a bit like a spearing mantis and has a shrimp like body. The eyes of the
A Phyllodesmium nudibranch, this sea slug can live on solar power.
mantis are the most sophisticated known to science. They can see in 12 different colors as opposed to our three-color vision. The speed and force this animal can strike with is amazing, so just look and don’ t touch!
Some fish have also moved from the reef to the sand and sometimes with a strange partner. One such fish is the Shrimp Goby, this goby lives together with a snapping shrimp in a hole in the sand. The shrimp will maintain the‘ house’ while the goby will act as the guard and warn its partner if there is danger.
Some anemones can live on the sandy bottom as well, along with all its inhabitants like clownfish, commensal shrimp and porcelain crabs. All these creatures get protection by living in the anemones stinging cells; in return they will protect their host from any enemies. The most famous housemate of the anemone must be the Clownfish, aka Nemo. Clownfish are all born as males, the most dominant one( usually the biggest) will turn female. When the female dies the next dominant male will quickly change sex so the family lives on.
Another cool fish living in a hole along the coral rubble is the Jawfish. The interesting part about this fish is that it is a mouth brooder. It keeps its eggs in the mouth until they hatch. It’ s the male Jawfish that takes care of this task; the eggs will hatch in its
Jawfish typically reside in burrows that they construct in sandy substrate.
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