It was a dark night in Cozumel a couple of years ago. No moon, a few clouds scudding across the sky, no other boats within sight, lots of stars "glittering" and winking. It was a very quiet night and I felt like slipping silently into the water like a Hollywood version of a WW II Frogman, but, instead, we took noisy big strides off the boat into wonderful 80 deg F water. As we started down and shown our lights toward the bottom, it seemed to move! It was moving! Or a least a "herd" of spiny lobsters was moving, making a mass migration across a sandy, submarine plane. What a sight! Like something out of Indiana Jones.
Then, we spotted an octopus perched on an outcropping of coral and we surrounded him/her. As we all placed our beams of light on his body he began to pulsate and go through the spectrum of visible light, trying every color imaginable to disquise himself. It was like a scene from "First Encounters of the Third Kind"; I expected him to begin rotating and ascending like a space craft.
And there was more--a huge crab sat next to a piece of coral and slowly chipped off pieces, putting them in his maws as neatly as a biochemist injecting samples of DNA into centrifuge tubes.
And more....that night we saw so much marine animal life that I seriously considered doing nothing but night dives for the rest of my life. At least until the next morning when we did a 2-tank morning dive and I saw--ah, but that is another story!
Joewr