acanthaster's Identifications

An aggregation of adults of this species near canopy algae next to an old tree stump roughly in the middle of what I call 'syngnathid hotspot',a mainly sand and scanty seagrass area off kiosk and NSLSC.

Hopefully not a re-submission. A very common but often overlooked inshore fish in many parts of SA particularly the gulfs.This one's @ 'hotspot' off jetty precinct's kiosk (NB: there are several tiny=juvenile grass cling-fish aligned along stems quite near subject, however I don't expect most viewers to confidently accept their presence.The most obvious and sharply focused cling-fish is directly below the weed whiting's abdomen, and I am 100% sure it is not artifact. I've often seen these tiny, very cryptic fish move short distances along sea-grass stems, and they often switch sides on a stem then peer back over an edge,making them very hard to photograph!)

2 old slide scans of an adult banded morwong at a WCC station in a big,open cave near cliff base at Western River via charter boat tender.In one pic a leatherjacket - which cannot be seen but was just beyond the subject's caudal fin(it is visible in another pic which however is not good enough to include!) - is queuing for a clean, in the other pic the Western Cleaner Clingfish hosts' cup sponge station is obvious even though no definite WCCs are visible.Depth of cave station is ~ 3-5 m, but most of the dive time was spent @ 10+ m. My buddy was Steve Reynolds of MLSSA. We only ascended to this cave because we saw the morwong visiting it regularly and thought it was a good way to get photos of the otherwise fast, restless and elusive morwong. (We'd not seen this morwong species in SA before that.)