When Sand Divers Attack!

You never know what you’ll see on any given dive! This was just a routine dive at a site we like to go to in town. If we had a home dive site, this would be one of them. There are three frogfish there that we’ve been visiting for a while that recently spawned so we thought we’d go on a lazy dive to see if we could find them again.

On our way back I noticed some weird movement about 40ft deeper than we were so I went down to see what it was. Two sand divers were swimming in a circle, round and round and round. I’ve never seen them interact with each other before beyond laying in the sand in close proximity to each other so I started filming. I thought they might be about to mate.

After a quick break from the circling, one of them attacked the other one! It happened so fast! Check out the video below. The last 10-15 seconds I slowed the attack down to 10% of the original speed and it’s still super fast. The sand diver let the other one go after a while, it shook it off and they resumed circling. I’ve asked a lot of my fish behavior friends about this and no one has ever seen this behavior!

If you can, always have video capability underwater! You can even mount a GoPro to your camera housing so if you’re a macro shooter like us so you can still capture something crazy if it happens!

Happy Bubbles!