About me

The underwater world has always been my haven. I enjoy nothing more than sitting on the seafloor, watching a little fish poke its head out of a barnacle while mantas and sharks soar overhead.

I am a 17-year-old British-Italian nature enthusiast living in southern Costa Rica. I actively dive and snorkel, spending as much time underwater as I possibly can. I mainly dive for fun and to photograph any small marine creature I find - my focus, naturally, being blennies - but I also aid a local coral conservation.

My love of blennies started with the funnily named 'Fishgod blenny' (Malacoctenus ebisui). I loved this blenny, not just because of its name but because of its behaviour. Such small fish have so much personality, and it is a wonder to watch them fearlessly scare away others twice their size as if they were the monarchs of their territory. A very apt name indeed.

What finally pushed me to learn more about these blennies was not ease of understanding or curiosity, but my constant misidentification of them. And that is how my obsession began.

Initially, I wanted to dive for hours over a single rock, letting the world disappear in favour of the small movements of an even smaller fish with a big personality. Afterwards, I would scour my fish ID books, searching for its species.

Soon, I discovered iNaturalist. I expected clarity, answers to my questions. Instead, I found a large gap in the identifications for the tropical Eastern Pacific. Hundreds of old observations sat forgotten, unnamed beyond a broad class. 'Blennioidei', 'Chaenopsidae', 'Coralliozetus'. I knew this had to change. How could I leave such a lovely animal in the unknown?

And thus I began spending hours every day researching, reading information on websites and studying scientific papers. This turned into a dump file, where I collected data I had learnt. Distinctive features, habitats, colouration - everything I knew. I was already planning to turn my attention to global species next. But this turned out to be a much more difficult ordeal. While the Americas had many of their species documented throughout some websites, it was not the same story for many other countries. Data was scattered, highly regional, and sometimes even inaccessible. The world lacked a unified resource. So I set out to make one.

When I was on the verge of completing my dataset for the first family, a wrench was thrown into my plans. A simple question asked by my mother - 'Why keep this for yourself?'
I knew then I had something greater on my hands: the opportunity to make this data public. Maybe someone who also loves blennies as much as me will find it. Or maybe someone will just get to enjoy the satisfaction of identifying years-old pictures.

Either way, what began as an uncomplicated file turned into something far more, something not just for me - this project.

My goal is to make the ultimate guide for blennies worldwide. To finally give a name to these overlooked species, so that anyone, anywhere, can look at a small face peering from a hole in the reef and finally give a name to what they are seeing.
So that the unknown is maybe, just maybe, a little less unknown.