Banggai Cardinalfish

I posted this photo of a bunch of Banggai cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) late last month during my stay in Lembeh:

luggage

I'm accustomed to seeing lots of Banggai cardinalfish in Lembeh, so it was kind of a surprise to receive a comment indicating that the aquarium community generally believes that these fish are on the verge of extinction.

Perhaps they are in other locations, but in Lembeh, they've been flourishing for years...even though they've been artificially transplanted there and may be displacing other fish.

Here's a time-lapse sequence of one community of these fish, which should help convey how many there are, as well as how active they are in Lembeh:

As an aside, I tried every which way possible to upload this video to online video sharing services like my Vimeo account, but there was no way I could get the video to look good.

My original .mov file looked fine on my computer, but there is so much movement/ action in the sequence that the re-encoding process for Vimeo made the video look horrible. I tried encoding at really high bitrates (up to 70Mbit/s), but it didn't make any difference.

So I gave up (after much head-banging and shouting of expletives) and encoded this .flv file and uploaded to my own server. The file is about 65MB, encoded at 20Mbit/s, so it might take a while to load if you're on a slow connection.