Porto De Galinhas: Part 2

So my second day in Porto De Galinhas, we decide to go out to the tide pools at low tide and see what there is to see. I snorkel my way out there, and despite my best efforts yesterday in the pool, my friend goes out by jangada boat with no interest in snorkeling out to the reef. The reef was not the best I've seen but I did manage to find a few nice hard corals like the one above.
I also saw this eel, munching on something under a rock. Cool find!

Another nice coral species.......

And of course in the tide pools there were lots of my favorite fish, the seargeant major, aka Abudefduf saxatilis or backwards Silitaxis fudfeduba! Everyone on the jangada got handfuls of fish food to get these babies to eat out of your hand.

Here's my friend, doing his marine biologist pose, in front of the jangadas. What a professional!

The visibility wasn't all that great for taking photographs under the water, but I snorkeled around for about 2 hours trying to find the most interesting things the reef had to offer. I found this guy, Diodon hystrix or the Porcupinefish hiding under a ledge.

After snorkeling out to the reef, we went exploring to find the seahorse building in town. We found it, along with a room full of aquarium's next door.

We saw soo many seahorses in the tanks! Here is a tankful of babies.

Here's a pretty looking yellow fellow.....

Also a nice vermelho (red) one in another tank. So I asked Ierece about this place when I got back and I also talked to the researchers there. It turns out that they do not have funding from the government and they mostly focus on environmental education. However Ierece also told me that it was this lab that trained the fishermen to do the seahorse eco-tourism, which they think are having a negative impact on the environment and seahorse populations in this estuary. I guess this group of researchers also has a history of collecting seahorses for their aquarium tanks without a permit from the environment department. Seems like I've come across my first instance of politics within the seahorse realm down here in Brazil. And all unknown by me!

Regardless of the politics, I still had an amazing weekend, filled with seahorses (surprisingly!), funny looking chickens, jangada boats and brazilian company!