Hello scubashooter, you may be right about the biodiversity topping out in the above mentioned places. And not to sound contrarian or to undermine my earlier statement about PNG diversity, but the highest number of species doesn't always add up to the best diving experience. I think there are several concepts wrapped up in the idea of biodiversity, not all leading to the same place. Please allow me to explain as best I can. I meant that in comparing Lembeh and Milne bay PNG in terms of variety of oddball critter life, they are not so different. I for one am happy with seeing 1 Mimic Octopus. Seeing 5 or 6 is doesn't, I feel, add much to the experience. To continue, I believe that most if not all of the critters one could find in Lembeh, can be found in MB. As for PNG as a whole, having been around most of the country, there was hardly a day that went by without someone on the boat finding a nudibranch that wasn't descibed in any of our books. And I believe the most recent marine creature of any size that was discovered in the Indo-Pacific was a kind of nocturnal Bambo shark several feet long, found in Madang harbour 5 or so years ago. So PNG is no slouch in terms of pure marine biodiversity. There will probably be things you could find only in one place or the other, but gathering from the info I got from several avid critter hunter/photogs, the main difference btw the 2 places lies in the ease with which the critters are found due to shear numbers. Which, to me, seems a bit...unnatural. It almost seems that things in the Lembeh area are a bit out of balance. Much of Indo, indeed most of the Indo-Pacific seems to be missing the larger animals which eat the smaller animals. This is perhaps an over simplification and I'm certainly no expert in marine ecosytem analysis, but I think this is significant. My first post on this thread was meant to try and respond to the diversity question raised by diverjanet as well to address the overall jist of the question posed by the originator of the thread, which I took to mean: 'Will I be disappointed with Milne Bay and the extra money spent getting there after diving Lembeh, or could it be justified by some other factors?' I think the biodiversity issue is somewhat misleading in this case and not just in an aesthetic fish watching sense. To me the thing which makes a destination most satisfying is not just variety, it's getting the sense that you are able to observe a complex and large range of animal interaction-a sort of big balance, which I think PNG still has more than anywhere else. I think there is a direct correlation to the health/balance of a marine environment and population density. And PNG has one of the lowest in the world. As far as the pipe fish I saw, it did not crawl, it hovered motionless, it was brownish green and the weedy frondosa like appendages went all the way around the edge of it's slender body. It was about 4 inches long.-Andy