Maldives. Night at the bottom of the lagoon

From the book "Straight to the South", part 2 "Shark archipelago", episode 11.

Night diving is a mandatory part of almost any dive-safari, everything is painted in amazing colors in the dark under the water, and you can see the night underwater inhabitants, which can not be found during the day. But it is difficult in the Southern Maldives: marine life is poor inside the atolls but it is dangerous to dive at night in the ocean behind the barrier reef, at this time sharks go hunting, and those creatures who peasfully swim around you all day can attack you at night. Besides, there are powerful currents there, they can bring you into the open ocean and who will find you..

However, we did just one night dive on the shallow water near the banks inside a small coral atoll. Corals here pleased us, they are quite diverse - waves and currents do not threaten them, there is calm place in the lagoon, ...

Sea lilies live here freely. They sleep during the day, and they feed at night catching plankton by their feathers. It's time to look at them closer..

There are not many sea stars (fighters corals) there. Fish sleep under every coral bush, they almost don't react for our appearence, we can quietly shot them, you can see their real coloring in light of white lamp.

As elsewhere, there is a lot of scorpionfish here at night - small lionfish and others.

A small Moray eel, green with black spots, was hiding away in the corals.. But the most striking characters of this dive, of course, were octopuses. Observers naturalists definitely claim that they have a mind and a soul..

The statics of the photo does not allow to tell about what we saw, look at our movie:

We had air in our cylinders in abundance and we could walk for a long time, but after an hour under the water we decided to leave it, because a shark appeared next to us there, its silhouette periodically flashed nearby in light of our lanterns and who knows what it had in mind – there is a night, there is a darkness, nobody watch out.. :)