The opportunity to witness and photograph marine life behavior can be rare. Even then, the behavior may be either mundane or over with before you can get a camera on it. But yesterday, a determined little octopus put on quite a show. It was so unexpected that most of the time, all I could do was watch, laugh, and marvel.

Visibility was so bad at Haggarty's Crane that we had to run a reel about 20 feet from the anchor to the crane. At some point, I snagged the line with my fin, and it dropped to the seafloor. No biggie, so I set about photographing something on a rock. Moments later, this two-spot octopus burst, yes, burst from its hole and glommed onto the bolt-snap of my reel. In a blink, it dragged as much of the contraption into its den as it could.

After I gently retrieved the reel, the octo went after it again! Since my presence didn't daunt its efforts, I brought Phil over for a look at my active little friend.

One of the crane's resident moray eels offering to be cleaned. Many of the cleaner shrimp were in the hole down around his tail.

Blue-banded goby hanging around the eel's home.

On Golf Ball Reef, Phil showed me a less than eyelash-size Doto amyra. I was barely able to get this beautiful nudibranch using a 105 mm lens and subsee +10 diopter. Wish it grew a tad larger here.

• Re: A thieving two-spot octopus Patrick 08:52:59 12/03/14 (0)