Catching a mandarinfish courtship in action during a dive on Magic Pier Dive with Wakatobi’s Dive Yacht Pelagian.
Sunset was close at hand, and we were getting ready for a twilight dive on Magic Pier in Pasar Wajo Bay on the southeast coast of Buton Island in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Regularly visited by the Pelagian, a 10-passenger luxury live-aboard dive yacht operated by Wakatobi Dive Resort, the Pier is known for something really special – mandarinfish! Lots of mandarinfish!
If you haven’t yet seen a mandarinfish (Synchiropus splendidus), here’s what you’re missing. A member of the Dragonet family, mandarinfish are exceptionally striking with a garish coloration consisting of vivid green swirls atop a predominantly orange body fringed in deep blue with yellow accents around the head.
Although mandarinfish are not particularly rare in the Tropical Western and Indo Pacific, finding them with any reliable form of consistency is somewhat limited. This is particularly true if your goal (as it was mine) is to capture images of them during their more amorous exploits.
During a trip in the Philippines at Puerta Galera, I was taken to a “mandarinfish hot spot”. Unfortunately, this site was also well known to every dive operation. The experience for me was neither productive nor enjoyable due to the high volume of divers present, which stirred up some particulate I felt as if I were inside a giant snow globe after it had be shaken.
In comparison, the middle part of Pelagian’s one week itinerary includes two days at Pasar Wajo Bay in Buton. This area is well off the beaten path of other live aboard dive boats, as well as being far removed from dive resorts. The main element here is muck diving that serves up a variety of marine life you generally don’t find in coral reef habitats. And the signature attraction is the scores of mandarinfish that reside around the base of the site called Magic Pier.
The dive begins 15 minutes before sunset to allows divers to properly position on the bottom midway down the large rubble pile below the pier.
Having done this dive twice, I am still amazed by just how many of these ornately colored fish, about half the size of my thumb, are here in this spot.
In addition to a group of about seven on this dive, there were still more emerging from a wide number of crevasses to my right and left. Most were females milling about awaiting the arrival of a suitor–or in this case suitors, which made their appearances in short order.
The only real give away to identifying the sex of the mandarinfish is generally in its size, as mature males are typically larger than the females. In most fish I.D. books, the average size female mandarinfish is described to be 1-1/2 inches in length with males only slightly larger. What I find surprising is that a good number of the males at Magic Pier are… well, above average and appearing to be close to 3 inches in length, having me wonder what these guys are eating.
Strutting their Stuff
With unabashed confidence, the males will mark their arrival with a little bit of a flourish and pectoral fins fluttering like a hummingbird. And at the same time, they “work the room” by tightly circling the ladies in a courting fashion.
Typically, during this phase of the courtship, the dance might involve up to three fish – one male to two females. But as the more willing individuals of the group take over, pairs will begin a spiraling ascent two to three feet above the coral. The purpose for this maneuver is because mandarinfish are broadcast spawners; both the eggs and sperm are released simultaneously into the water column to be carried away in the currents. To achieve optimum fertilization, the female must come as close to the male’s pelvic fins as she can, at the peak moment of their climb, where she will then release her eggs.
With my camera armed with modeling lights set on red-light mode I was able to easily follow the upward progression of the pairs without losing them in the frame as I shot. At the point at which you would think they would continue ascending, the pairs would suddenly break contact and rapidly descend back to their starting place. From start to end, this process that can take mere seconds to complete.
Looking back down the show was far from over, as another male was already in the midst of putting the moves on the next available babe. At the same time, two large males hit a disagreement on who should stay and who should go. With dorsal fins erect, the two sized each other up trying to determine who was the bigger badass, which I thought was hilarious given their excessively flamboyant coloration. Expecting to see the fur, rather fins fly, their squaring off behavior suddenly came to an end in a draw.
During the span of some 35 to 40 minutes, the entire area within this embankment of rocks below the pier looked like a swinging singles club exclusively for mandarinfish with as many as 3 to 4 different males successfully mating with up to 6 different females. Talk about some guys having all the luck.
