Does size really matter ? ...
Weighting 26g for about 10cm, the blue ring octopus can easily kill a horse with a drop of its venom!

Most often sighted in Australia, Indonesia, and the Indo-pacific Ocean, Solomon Islands, Philippines and Vanuatu the blue ring octopus is also regularly spotted on some well kept secret muck dives in Thailand !
​These colourful octopus prefer to live in sandy/ mucky areas where they blend in perfectly. They are bottom dwellers not found in open water. 

This shy little octopus is among the deadliest animals on our planet!
That being said "small dogs tend to bite more than big dogs because they need to impress"...
And because the blue ring octopus doesn't have anything to prove... it is also not the attacking type.

This mighty little octopus is said to hold two types of venom in its saliva, both carry enough punch to kill 26 adults, within a few minutes.

The blue-ringed octopus is not agressive, they will not attack humans willingly and prefer to avoid them. A few bites happen every year globally on humans who stepped on one unknowingly, but surprisingly, there have been very few report ever of a deadly bite.

Only 3 death-by-blue-ring-octopus-bite have ever been reported, the other people who got bit experienced progressive muscular weakness leading to difficulty breathing/ swallowing. There is currently no antidote available for this venom however it is temporary and muscles will usually start working again after about 15 hours.

If you think a wetsuit can protect you, remember that octopus'  beak is hard and sharp and can easily penetrate through a wetsuit... so please let them be!!!

BRO can give birth to up to 100 tiny blue-ringed pup per litter. Just like other octopi, blue-ringed are semelparous creatures, which implies they give birth only once in their lifetime. After a female octopus lays a litter of eggs, she stops hunting to look over her eggs and dies of starvation before they even hatch. ​😕😭
Something quite funny about their mating behaviour is that blue-ringed-octopus can't tell a male from a female before starting a sexual act. When two males start to "copulate" it lasts about 30 seconds and no "semen" is released, while when the couple is male-female it may last 160 minutes and spermatophores are exchange. Basically it means that before inserting his attribute (hectocotylus), the male cannot determine the sex of its partner...

Growing up from the size of your fingernail to the size of a chicken egg, the blue-ringed octopus only live about 2 years, this is the time it takes them to be sexually mature, find a mate and give birth to their first and last offsprings.
It is believed that Octopus are extremely intelligent creatures who could achieve so much more if they lived a little longer to learn from experience and if they could learn from their parents instead of starting alone from scratch... 

Divers affectionally call him BRO but there are actually 4 kinds of blue-rigged octopus in the books:
Greater blue-ringed octopus - Hapalochlaena lunulata (who has the largest rings)
Lesser blue-ringed octopus - Hapalochlaena maculosa (aka Southern Blue-Ringed Octopus)
Hapalochochlaena fasciata and Hapalochochlaena nierstraszi.

The wrasse lives mainly in the Indo-Pacific region, where it lives in the waters of 48 countries between 0 and 100 meters deep. This wrasse has an exceptional life expectancy: 25-30 years, and some individuals studied have even lived for fifty years!

The humpback wrasse diet: defender of the coral reef...
Napoleon plays an important role in the ecosystem of coral species. Indeed, giant wrasses are one of the few animals that can feed on the purple acanthaster or Christ's crown (Acanthaster planci), an invasive starfish species whose diet consists almost exclusively of coral. It also feeds on mollusks, crustaceans and other poisonous species such as box fish or sea hares.

However, the napoleon is in danger.
Now protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973), its population is estimated to have halved over the past 30 years. Its fishing is prohibited in many countries, but it is not always controllable, and this animal is still abundantly fished in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.
In addition to their pretty colors, giant wrasses have the misfortune of being very tasty and are considered a luxury treat in Hong Kong where some businessmen are willing to pay 2000 USD to wow the gallery by eating a pair of lips!

Please don't feed napoleons!
No more than other species for that matter ... Tourism poses a certain risk for the Napoleon wrasse population. At some tourist hot-spots, animals are baited by food thrown by boats, in other places, dive guides feed them hard-boiled eggs to amuse tourists.
The fish become dependent on these baits and no longer distrust boats or humans.

The ribbon Eel is the only member of its genus. Scientists thought for a long time that there were 3 types of ribbon eel, the black, the blue, and the yellow species. But now we know they form a unique species changing sex and colour during its lifespan!

Every individual is born as male.
Juveniles and sub-adults are black with a yellow dorsal fin. When they reach adulthood, they keep the yellow fin but the body turns blue and starts developing female reproductive organs.
​When they reach their full size, they turn into female and change their color to complete yellow.
They will then find a mate, lay their eggs, and die within a month.

​The shaded Batfish... loved by divers, he is not so easy to observe in its juvenile form, which is drastically different from its adult form.

Once adult, two black bars appear at the level of the eyes and just before the pectoral fin. The dorsal and anal fins have elongated well and are yellowing a bit. Its body is now silver. It can reach the forty centimeters

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The sexes are separated and there is no sexual dimorphism. Platax pinnatus is ovuliparous and the fertilization is external, in open water. The larvae are pelagic a few days then undergo their last metamorphosis and the juvenile begins its life near the bottom.

There are several types of Batfish, the most commonly encountered in Thailand and Myanmar is the Platax teira, also known as longfin batfish or longfin spadefish, but surprisingly we do not often encounter their juveniles...

If the Platax Teira is not afraid about you, it is even curious, it's not the case of the Platax Pinnatus, ​which stays away from you.

While critically endangered, The Hawksbill Turtles are the most frequently encountered turtles on our cruises, today let's learn about hawk-billed turtle or Eretmochelys imbricata...
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All Sea Turtles, are cold-blooded creatures, belonging to the reptile family, just like snakes, crocodiles or dinosaurs!

Hawk-billed turtle, the only representative of the genus Eretmochelys, lives in the subtropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It is therefore quite possible to cross it in the Andaman Sea, in the midst of coral reefs. In Thailand, they can be seen both in the North Andaman (Surin and Similan islands) and South Andaman. 

Hawksbill turtles and green turtles, are both commonly seen in the Andaman Sea and hard to tell them apart at first sight. Here are a few tips to differentiate them:

Hawksbill turtles have a beak, while green turtles have a round face. 

The turtle's nose is also a good differentiation factor: those of Hawksbills looks upward, on top of their beak while green turtle's nose is forward, on the front of their face. When looking at a tutle from the front you would see the green's nostrils a lot more.

The carapace of the sea turtles are also a good way to tell them appart. The shape of the green turtle is rounder with squales next to each other and a soft edge, while the hawksbill turtle is more hear-shaped with squales overlapping each other and the edge is serrated, like a saw.

If you have a photo of a turtle from bellow and you are trying to find out if it is a green or a Hawkbill turtle, the shape will be your best friend.
The Hawksbill turtle has a longer neck, and serrated carapace (looks closely in between the two back flipper) you may also see its beak!

The hawksbill turtle is one of the few animals known to feed on sponges and is the only known spongivorous reptile. This diet make them very important to avoid sponges overtaking the reef.

Like most sea turtles, Hawksbill live a solitary life meeting only for reproduction. This turtle mates and returns to the beach where it was born, every two or three years, to lay eggs...

The hawksbill turtle digs a hole in the sand at night where it lays more than a hundred eggs.  
After about two months, these eggs will hatch. The little ones will then have to try to get back to the ocean quickly, at they risk of being eaten by birds or crabs!
Did you know? The temperature of the nest during the 60 days incubation will determine the sex of the litter! Cooler sand leads to more males hatching and vice versa.

Yes ! The hawk-billed turtle is now critically endangered. They are believed to be the most endangered of the seven species of sea turtle, with only approximately 8,000 nesting females left globally. Its beautiful carapace has been used by jewellers and for home decoration for thousands of years. Ghost fishing, by catch and sea trash are also a major treat to these gorgeous animals.

It is estimated that millions of hawksbill turtles died in the 20th century due to carapace trade. Additionally, hawk-billed turtle eggs are still eaten across the globe, and turtles themselves are killed for their flesh.

Colourful fishes have always been a favorite to tropical sea divers but have you taken a closer look at the gorgeous coral species that inhabit the Andaman Sea?  
Do you know what corals are? How coral grows to form the coral reefs (Planet earth largest living structures)  and why they are so important for our planet?
Contrary to common beliefs, corals are animals, not plants and surely neither rocks!
What you see above is actually a group of animal living under the same roof... developing over time like any living thing.

There are hundreds of species of corals! Most live in tropical seas with optimal conditions for their development: lots of light and a temperature between 25 and 30 ° C.

Hard coral are made of a rigid calcium carbonate (polyps' exoskeleton made out of limestone) and appear very much like rocks. When a polyp dies, their skeleton remains and new polyps grown on top of the last ones enlarging the coral one life at a time. Hence hard coral grows very slowly.
There are several categories of hard corals encountered in the Andaman Sea, each of these with many sub-categories and species.

With a very slow growth (from 0.5 to 4.5 cm / year), these round-shaped corals bummies constitute "the pillars" of most reefs, in the Andaman Sea and beyond! They can reach massive sizes like the multi million years bummies depicted bellow from the Burma Banks.

Soft corals are easiest identified from hard coral because they do not have a hard skeleton. They also have 8 arms per polyp. 

The Andaman Sea was gifted with several types of seafans, tall web-like fan structures in various colours. The most impressive is probably the Giant seafans (Anella mollis) which can reach 2 meters in diameter!

Not only are coral stunningly beautiful and giving the Andaman Sea its colours but they are so much more important than for background imagery! 
1- coral feed small critters and fish that feed the bigger ones, no coral= no more fish!
2- 500 million people make a living from coral reefs: from fisheries to tourism
3- coral reefs can reduce waves by 95% and could save the coastline from the damaging effects of tsunamis and storms
4- Coral reefs are also the lung of our planet! Generating half of our planet's oxygen and absorbing about a third of the carbon dioxide generated from fossil fuels usage.