Animals

The potato grouper is a big reef grouper, up to 2 meters and 110 kilos, with large dark potato-shaped blotches.

At dawn, the pelagic thresher shark rises to the cleaning stations, then goes back down as the sun climbs.

The oriental sweetlips is a fish striped black and white, with spotted yellow fins and thick lips, that spends the day motionless under overhangs.

The orbicular batfish is a 50-centimeter silver disk, as tall as it is long.

The oceanic whitetip shark circles under the hulls of moored boats, at the surface.

The oceanic manta ray, the largest ray in the world, measures 4 to 5 meters across, up to 7 meters, and lives offshore.

The nurse shark, plain brown with barbels, lives on the bottom in the Caribbean: it sleeps under overhangs by day and hunts in the holes of the reef at night.

Nudibranchs are shell-less sea slugs, often brightly colored, with their gills exposed on their backs: several thousand species, from 4 millimeters to 60 centimeters, live in every sea.

The Napoleon wrasse often stays on the same reef and comes to check out divers up close.

The mobula ray of the Azores, the sicklefin or Chilean devil ray, measures 2 to 3 meters across and has sickle-shaped wings.