Iran Press/ America: For most scuba divers, few places underwater match the visual thrill of a kaleidoscopic coral reef teeming with colorful fish. For Jeff Milisen, a marine biologist and photographer in Kona, Hawaii, there is no better place to dive than an open stretch of deep ocean. At night.
“There’s a whole lot of nothing,” he said. “There’s no bottom, no walls, just this space that goes to infinity. And one thing you realize is there are a lot of sea monsters there, but they’re tiny,” The New York Times reported.
Of course, there are big monsters, too, like sharks. But the creatures Milisen is referring to are part of a daily movement of larval fish and invertebrates, which rise from the depths to the surface each evening as part of one of the largest migrations of organisms on the planet. The emerging hobby of taking pictures of them is known as blackwater photography.
Most of the larvae are no bigger than a fingernail; others are even smaller. And they can easily be mistaken for bits of seaweed or drifting detritus. But up close, when captured with a camera using a special lens called a macro, the animals can appear to loom as large as wild animals on a safari — a safari on another planet.
Five years ago, Milisen began sharing his photos in a Facebook group, and there he discovered a community of passionate nighttime adventurers who were capturing images of living things rarely seen before. Perplexed and astonished by what they were photographing, Milisen and others in the community, called the Blackwater Photo Group, began contacting fish scientists, asking for help in identifying what they were seeing.
Even the most seasoned specialists responded with incredulity.
“The No. 1 thing people, even scientists, ask is: ‘What the hell is that?’” said Ned DeLoach, an experienced underwater photographer, who, with his wife, Anna, and the writer Paul Humann, has published eight books on marine fishes. “Why these images are so spectacular and so popular is they’re so otherworldly. People have never imagined that creatures like this exist, and that has attracted photographers.”
As the blackwater hobby has taken off, gaining adherents around the globe, more and more photographers have captured stunning images and videos that reveal a secret world of bizarre, tiny animals that scientists have struggled for decades to better understand. Many of the images have gone viral on social media, and some recently won major underwater photography awards.
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