This week in south gilis Lombok … The ribbon eel (Rhinomuraena quaesita) or Bernis eel is an elegant creature bearing a resemblance to a mythical Chinese dragon with a long, thin body and high dorsal fins.

A couple of weeks ago still black and a junior and now grown up he has changed colour to a shiny blue.
The colour change of the ribbon eel is related to sex change and is not known from any other moray eel species. The presumed juveniles and sub adults are jet black with a yellow dorsal fin, in adult males the black is replaced by blue, and adult females are entirely yellow or yellow with some blue to the posterior. The blue adult males range from 65 to 94 centimeters length, while the larger yellow females can reach up to 130 centimeters.

We saw beside the Chinese dragon, a growing numbers of frogfish in different colours, a black giant frogfish, a green giant frogfish and a hispid frogfish; also we saw crocodilefish; did a visit to the pygmy seahorse family and found some ambon scorpionfish in red and orange!

After his mountain tour to the highest pick of Lombok the “mount rinjani” our old friend Soenke came back for a couple of dives. He was diving with us at his favorite dive site in Lombok “canyon”. He was not disappointed to see his buddies the whitetipshark again. And also Eric and Florian who came to us with only 5 dives under their belt had to celebrate, they saw their first Turtle!

Hope to see you with us in South Lombok soon…