The Atlantis resort is a lushly landscaped oasis on the eastern coast of the island of Negros.

There are no docks. We ventured out on small speedboats or on these trimarans, boarded by wading off the beach.

The lush reefs are on islands an hour or so away - we went to them on two all-day trips. Along the Negros coast, the diving is "muck diving" - that is, sandy bottoms with scattered coralheads. Actually, a lot of plain sandy bottom.

Still, there's a lot of macro life in this environment - small things like shrimps, crabs, nudibranchs and other creatures cohabiting with the tufts of soft corals, anemones and other things that have established themselves wherever they can.

This is a ghost shrimp on a soft coral.

This is the underside of an anemone, where shrimp and crabs often lay eggs.

I thought I should have a diver's scene in here somewhere.

Inasmuch as we have very little soft coral in the Caribbean - seeing the many beautiful varieties here was a pleasure.

A lesson in the ways that the water column filters colors: This soft coral appeared plain white, but under the light of my strobe its "true" color was revealed.

These tubular soft-coral polyps were continuously opening and closing as they captured plankton from the water column.

The tips of these coral polyps resemble anchors, which is probably why their name is Euphyllia ancora.

Leather coral is a form of soft coral, as well.

Featherstars are much more abundant and robust in the Pacific than in the Caribbean.

They can be quite intricate and beautiful.

Featherstars spread their "feathers," so to speak, to filter plankton from the currents. Many remain curled up during the day and open up at night.

Clownfish, which are actually called anemonefish, cohabit with anemones, somehow negating the anemone's stinging characteristics. They seem to spend a lot of time body surfing through their anemones' tentacles.

This is a tomato anemonefish.

There is a specific clown anemonefish, with elaborate white and black markings; I didn't see any.

On the other hand, these little guys are called false clown anemonefish.

False clown anemonefish

"Pink anemonefish." Often, to the naked eye, underwater, they and their anemones often looked very pale.

Semicircle Angelfishes

Juvenile Pinnate Spadefish - also called a Batfish. When you saw it swim it certainly looks like a bat.

Although seeing frogfish in the Caribbean is a big deal, we saw so many here that I stopped photographing them.

The first one we saw was this little yellow guy.

After that, they got bigger and bigger. This gray guy was about six inches long.

Frogfish sit on sponges and corals, disguised as lumps of sponges or corals, and wait for prey to swim closely by.

I caled this one the camo frogfish, which, of course, is what frogfishes do - excel at camouflage.

This was the world's biggest frogfish - as I remember about eight inches long.

The first time I saw a black frogfish (not this one), which is about six inches long, I knew the guide said there was a frogfish there but I couldn't find it. I was looking for a lumpy little something on a big piece of black coral. Finally, my buddy gestured: The "black coral" was the frogfish.

This guy either yawned, burped or possible sucked in a meal while I was shooting. Didn't see the meal-acquisition part in action.

Black ribbon eel.

This spotted shrimp goby is one of a number of small bottom-dwelling fishes that share their burrows with a species of blind shrimp. The shrimps spends their time keeping the burrow in order - as in cleaning out sand particles - and the gobies wait for food to pass by.

Another bottom-dweller: A yellowbarred jawfish.

Incredibly creative artistic shot of one of the speedboats, from underneath.

One late afternoon we got on a speed boat and went off to see the mandarin fish. The idea was that we would see these little fishes at dusk as they went about their courtship rituals before going up into the water column to mate. That didn't work out so well - perhaps having people popping off flashes at you to take your picture is a mood-killer. Anyway, a beautiful fish.

These little fishes are called humbug damsels.

We saw a number of these eels. It would appear from the field guide to be a yellowmargin moray.

Lionfish. We saw quite a number of these. Fortunately, since those spines are stingers, they're quite docile.

Foxface rabbitfishes.

Ornate ghost pipefish.

Ornate ghost pipefish.

Long-nosed hawkfish.

Over the course of six days of diving, I devoted about 30 minutes of my life to trying to photograph fishes called many-spotted sweetlips. The juveniles are really striking in color patterns. Actually, kind of goofy. They're constantly moving, wiggling, often in stands of staghorn coral. So I got photos of parts of them, never a complete fish.

Until the last dive, a night dive, when I found this one in the open. It still wiggled incessantly, however.

As adults, they're not nearly as colorful.

I don't know about adult wiggliness, however.

Lizardfishes aren't my favorites, but this was an unusual sight.

Pygmy filefish. They have a lot of variations of it, and this one is probably called a radial filefish, but it's very similar to a pygmy filefish from the Caribbean.

Thorny seahorse.

Broad-banded pipefishes.

Possibly the strangest fish I saw was the sea moth, which I originally thought was a crustation or other type of creature until I looked it up. Its fins have evolved into sort of legs and it crawls slowly across the sandy bottom. They usually hang out in pairs, and there was another, smaller one (probably the male) nearby, but that photo didn't turn out very well.

A lot of the diving was in a marine sanctuary, but once in a while we would see these fish traps on the bottom. Regrettably, we saw few big fishes, due to overfishing.

On the night dive I came across this scene of two black-saddled toby's settled down to sleep on a coralhead. Brittlestars tend to be active at night.

Saw a number of these blue seastars (no common name).

We saw a lot of black spiny sea urchins.

And saw a couple of these. At the back is the notorious crown of thorns seastar, which is a voracious devourer of coral. Some years, their population will explode and they'll devastate reefs.

Fluted giant clam. The colors are algae that live within its tissues, as with corals. The nutrition the algae provide helps in its growth to giant status.

Found this rather pratical-looking oyster on a night-dive. About seven inches across. It's a variable thorney oyster.

This is a peacock mantis shrimp, which isn't a shrimp at all, but a six-to-eight-inch crustacean. For a long time, the only times we saw them they were peering out of their burrows.

But found this one in the open. They're very strong and have been said to break the fingers of fishermen who accidently pull them up in their nets.

We saw many nudibranchs, relatives of snails that tend to be very colorful. Nudibranch literally means "naked lungs." Their gills are the fancy stuff located outside their bodies, presumably maximizing filtration of oxygen from the water. There are so many types in the Pacific that they tend not to have common names, as is the case with this five-inch one.

This nudibranch seems more gill than body.

These are two nudibranchs in the act of mating.

Really big turtle - and remorafish friend.

We saw a number of large turtles.

Okay. An amusing highlight of the trip was the incident with the sea snake. Banded sea snakes are highly poisonous, but fortunately not aggressive. They periodically swim to the surface to breathe air.

As we descended on one dive, we saw a banded snake swimming to the surface. I was trying to track it to photograph it. As everyone else pointed out, repeatedly, for the rest of the trip, while I was looking up to find it, it was busy swimming right past me on its way down. Dan Easa took this photo.

I'm happy to report that I did not get bitten.