Muck diving.  “Le” muck diving.  There is no pretty way to say muck diving even if you are French.  In fact when you do muck dive for the first time and look out over a silty, sandy slope, or a pile of coral rubble, it seems that a hopeless hour underwater searching for some form of life, including your dive buddies, is ahead.  I was especially worried about unfairly judging muck diving at Maluku Divers in Ambon because my trip there immediately followed a boat trip through Raja Ampat which is so full of color and life everywhere.  But with a beautiful Balinese meal sitting in front of me at the end of the first day of diving on Ambon, my thoughts were that, perhaps all of the previous 15 days of travel, including three international flights through four countries, two domestic flights, and a liveaboard trip of twelve days, was just to arrive at Maluku Divers on Ambon.

Although we took one of the longest, but most scenic, ways to get to Ambon, once we arrived there, our traveling was over.  Our first dive at Laha I, along the southern coast of Ambon Bay, was reported to be an absurdly long interval away from the resort when in fact it took less than five minutes – barely enough time to be introduced to Jamal, our experienced dive guide from Lembeh, Mo our boat driver, and Hafez, a young Indonesian king who helped us with our equipment on the day boat.  Topside, this dive site happens to be a small but active wharf area where people seem to both live and work on their boats.  The children are especially intrigued by the foreign divers.  They wonder why we use our money to travel so far just to see the fish right under their boats.

We did a backward roll into the warm water and swam to a pile of rubble directly under the boats.  It was noon so I was completely surprised when it was a mandarin fish colony that we were on a mission to observe.  My previous encounters with mandarin fish were to watch them having sex at 6:30 in the evening, but they were also busy scampering about at noon, just ignorant of the opposite sex and yet brilliant against their colorless home.  I was so focused on getting that perfect photo of a mandarin fish that I almost missed just how many other creatures inhabited this rather small rubble complex.  Banded pipefish were just hanging in the water, and very long white antennae revealed the location of the largest banded coral shrimp that I had ever seen.  One of the oddest-looking fish, an estuarine stonefish, was lying there like a sunken shipwreck.  With the exception of the stonefish that seemed cemented into this habitat, I found it difficult to understand that out of the entire ocean these creatures chose this noisy, close to shore site, and yet they live here together at least during daylight, harmoniously.  These were my first 30 minutes in Ambon.

The psychedelic frogfish’s coloring was also a bit of a mystery to me.  It is usually obvious why a frogfish looks as it does; generally I am not sure that I have actually seen one when I have seen it because they imitate their habitat so well.  Although the overall color of the psychedelic frogfish allows it to blend in with the sand of Ambon, there are vibrant white lines that extend radially from its eyes and then swirl around over the main part of its body.  It was not until I read about this fish, where these patterns were shown to parallel those from certain hard corals, that I could begin to see how the fish evolved to mimic its environment.  However, the lines also have a sort of hypnotizing affect on the viewer, and perhaps have a dual purpose in distracting as well any prey so that it loses concentration for a moment.

The dives in Ambon rarely went below twenty meters.  Only once did I find myself at twenty-five meters and that was to watch a flamboyant cuttlefish that we had inadvertently chased to this depth.  Most dives occurred on this same coast, just different sections of it.  Even though the landscape was somewhat similar overall, sloping sandy, I was starting to feel that there were different neighborhoods.  The Laha dives were where the harlequin and bumblebee shrimp, pipefish, and assorted frogfish lived in the rubble and the sand.  Further west, the landscape becomes more covered with corals and especially crinoids.  Here there is also a jetty, Air Manis Jetty, where a different lifestyle is in development.  There is quite a bit of human refuse where eels and giant banded coral shrimp could find a home.  The crinoids here have space to move about the sand like ladies in 17th century ball gowns and were sometimes escorted by a matching ornate or long nosed ghost pipefish.  Octopi displayed themselves openly in daylight, and fat nudibranchs were busy chewing the sponges that covered the pilings of the pier.

Each hour underwater at Ambon went by like lightening for me.  I am not sure what kind of rating system one can apply to diving in Ambon.  A star rating system does not seem accurate because it conjures up more typical images like corals and blue water and big animals and whether there is current or not.  Things are not swimming around much and if they do have fins they can also have legs attached to creep around, and sometimes your photos of an odd creature inadvertently advertise Coke.  I am a scientist, and I cannot help but think of evolution when I am under the water.  All sorts of ideas pop into my head, like what exactly was evolution thinking, and how genetically different am I really than the rhinopias scorpionfish?  To me it seems that Ambon is a collection of evolution’s experiments or abandoned ones in addition to the usual animals, and perhaps a rating system should correlate to remarkable skills of evolution at work here and your confidence level as a diver when you leave.