Wetpixel member Luca Vaime of Underwater Tribe has posted a series of images of some very unique (and beautiful) schooling behavior by a large group of convict blennies (Pholidichthys leucotaenia) and posted them onto the Wetpixel Facebook group. Luca was in the Maluku Islands and describes the dive:

“The Dive site was an exploratory dive in South Bacan, Halmahera. It was a morning dive. Towards the end of the dive the convict blenny school was swimming towards me coming from the shallow waters. I was around 8-10m . Initially I thought they were catfish as catfish are known to be swimming in such a ball formation. When they arrived in front of me they started swimming up and down creating funny cylindrical shapes. My favorite one was when they turned into a teardrop shape. I have been diving for the last 7 years in Indonesia and made more than a thousand dives . I have seen in many occasion convict blennies , but never acting like that, they were not spawning. I would have been able to tell that. My guess based on the fact they swam right at me was that they tried to mimic a huge fish and intimidate myself. I could take pictures of them for a good 5 minutes after which they decided to back off ,and go back to an ordinary ball. Maybe because they have seen that I did not swim away?”

Luca was shooting with a Nikon D80 with 10.5mm fisheye in a Sea&Sea MDX-80 housing and two Inon Z-240 Inon strobes. Camera settings were: 1/125 at F9, ISO 100.