Just when I was beginning to think I might have found most things in the northern bay! But there is always something new! First of all, we were at Rickett’s Point on Saturday morning. I was looking at a piece of sponge and something moved that looked like an algae shrimp. It turned out to to be Little Shrimp. The second surprise was at Beaumaris Bay on Sunday morning. I saw a fish spitting out gravel from a hole. When it poked its head out, it looked like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It was an Alison’s Blue Devil, a species I didn’t imagine would even occur this far north.
It just goes to show, the more you look, the more you find.
Ricketts Point and Little Shrimp
Little Shrimp is covered in The Field Guide to Some Intertidal Shrimps of Victoria.
Algae shrimps are tiny species I’m familiar with from the tropics which is perhaps the only reason I even spotted this. Though the hump back put it in the Hippolyte shrimp family. A quick check of the field guide and it seems clear this is the species. A fourth image appears to be of a different colour morph, as this animal can change its camouflage to suit its surroundings.
Huge schools of Black Bream
What was most impressive this morning was a school of 120 Black Bream. These are among the first fish to be killed outside of marine parks and are quite shy. But there is safety in numbers. Along with a handful of snapper and a couple of hundred Zebra Fish, they were quite approachable in the shallows. Numbers of fish at Rickett’s Point are approaching what it would have been like before the almost total loss of most of these resident fish from spearfishing in the 1950s.
Interview with Jon Nevill about historic fish abundance in northern Port Phillip Bay.
Here is an interview we did with Dr Jon Nevill. He talks about the historical abundance of fish around Hampton Breakwater in the 1950s and what happened since.
“In a half hour swim we would see hundreds and hundreds of fish. There were kelpies, there were snapper. Back then, the the fish life along that breakwater was plentiful, most of the fish would have been between, say a third of a kilo and a kilo and a half. Everywhere that there was cover, fish were everywhere.” John Nevill.
Beaumaris Bay and Alison’s Blue Devil
I didn’t manage to get a photo of this fish. They are notoriously shy and I spent 15 minutes or so watching and waiting for the odd glimpse as it would poke its head out from the rocks. What I saw was the orange eye, white markings down the face (indicative of a juvenile) and bold blue gill spots. The body was lozenge-shaped and dark around the face, and brownish grey on the body. Enough to verify this species though.
There are records of Alison’s Blue Devil from just south of Frankston.
There was a Big bellied Seahorse under the jetty at the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron. In typical seahorse habitat, attached to a man made structure. Another nice find was a female Widebody Pipefish. I don’t see the females often and this one had a lovely yellow belly. There were a few Oxynoe sea slugs but these are disappearing with the warm water (winter seems better for these guys). A pink dorid was great too.
