Guard duty!

[Dusty2]

Daddy on guard, notice the eggs in the upper right of the picture. He looks fierce even if he has noting to back it up.

[dwashbur]

'Tis the season. We found this guy sitting on eggs on our dive Saturday at your favorite place. The curious thing for me is, the eggs appear to be two different colors. It's not a trick of the light, I looked at them from several angles while we were there:



Moving on from there, we found this fellow also sitting on eggs:



Daughter chenari got this incredible closeup shot of the eggs themselves:



So it looks like the area should have a good crop of new fish coming along soon. I can't wait to get back and see them!

[Jan K]

Talk about colored eggs...
I did not see any fish close, so I cannot be sure who is the artist here, but it sure looks like
the Buffalo sculpin ones I saw at Langley last year...

BTW - nice shots guys, hope we'll see more fish soon ...

[Dusty2]

Yes they are from two different females and here is a close up showing the whites of there little eyes!
Also the painted's eggs in my pic are from two different females. Seems the guys like to pad there bets. If your going to spend all that time and energy protecting eggs you might as well have as many as you can get.

[Dusty2]

Talk about colored eggs...
I did not see any fish close, so I cannot be sure who is the artist here, but it sure looks like
the Buffalo sculpin ones I saw at Langley last year...

BTW - nice shots guys, hope we'll see more fish soon ...

Pretty sure they are painted greenling eggs. The multi colors all seem to match painteds.They aren't real good daddies. They will frequently leave if they feel threatened where buffalos usually stand and fight!

[Jan K]

Interesting, Dusty. My experience with Painted Greenlings here is little bit different, they do move off, but not before I get really close. But I was referring to the colors I saw here, the Painted Greenling were more on the pink side while the Buffalo matched closer to the batch I saw last year with the fish on them..

[Tom Nic]

Wow... great pics guys!

Love the close-ups... feels like I'm watching "Finding Nemo"!

[Jan K]

Scubagirl, I think the whole batch in the background are dead eggs, I checked photos from last year and while the ones in the foreground developed eyes, the others just stayed opaque.. But I am not expert, maybe someboy else can enlighten us

[Chenari]

Then how do you tell that Lingcod eggs are dead? From what I've seen, they're always opaque.

[Jan K]

From what little information I can find, they get even more opaque and turn almost white when they're dead.

Thank you for the info, happy to learn something new ..

[Pez7378]

I don't know if this applies or not. On 3/22/08 during the club dive, at the Maury Island Barges, some of the Ling eggs looked very opaque and some looked moldy? I thought that was strange how they looked "moldy" underwater. The fish were still there, "protecting them" but they weren't aggressive at all. I figured them for "dead" eggs.