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Whenever I’m on a dive trip, be it a commission or a even just a holiday, I always look out for interesting clams and shoot as many of them as possible.
Sneaking up on clams in the wild is not easy, they are tremendously sensitive and will invariably retract their mantles just at the moment you decide that you won’t get any closer and you might as well pull the trigger. Then again, if I’d wanted an easy hobby and something easy to photograph I should have chosen an entirely different subject.
The following are some of the best specimens I shot from a Red Sea trip in 2019. Tridacnids, both T. squamosa and T. maxima, are very common, even ubiquitous on most well-lit reefs. I should add that I’m not skilled enough to recognize T. costata, the new species discovered back in 2008. Maybe someone viewing these images will spot one. According to one report, they only make up six out of every thousand clams studied, so the numbers are against me I guess.
So, here’s a gallery, enjoy!
A soldierfish for size comparison
Lovely intense blues, and below, these two are quite similar, but like snowflakes, no two are truly identical.
a restrained color pallet, but look at those mantle margins.
Last but not least, this was quite a whopper.
Categories:
Invertebrates, Photography
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