Commensals

Commensals have to be my favourite dive finds… and it seems that with my eyes and instinct, I never come up empty-handed!  The real challenge for me isn't finding them... but getting the camera to see the same thing my eyes do...

(Mantis shrimp - a creature with eyes hundreds of times more potent than my 'eagle eyes', and the most sophisticated eye in the animal kingdom!  They have 16 different photoreceptor classes, compared to the human 3, which allows them to see in 3D, including UV and polarized light! )

Anyway, back to the commensals...  none of these critters is more than about 2cm long...

(Coral shrimp on an acropora branching coral)

Even the jetty at Meosmanggara village, which at first glance didn’t look too promising except for the presence of absolutely insane amounts of bait fish (the circles of dark clouds around the wooden jetty pilings below), there were little critters to be found!

Anenomes and bubble coral are guaranteed places to find symbiotic relationships:

The clown fish are the most conspicuous residents of anenomes, but they often share their tentakely home with many other residents...  all variety of shrimps (sometimes almost completely transparent!), porcelain crabs, etc...

One of my favourite reef residents is the feather star... although they look like plants with dye-happy hairstylists, they're actually animals (cousins of seastars and seacucumbers, in silhouette here)...

Their colourful waving arms often become home to commensals as well, providing shelter and protection for ghost pipe fish, squat lobsters, crinoid shrimp, cling fish, etc, which perfectly mimic their hosts' colour for camouflage...

crinoid shrimp (hiding his face behind a feather star arm)  (sorry about the foggy picture... but even more sorry about my fogging camera housing... i haven't been able to find a fix for it... so by the end of every dive/snorkel session, my pics all look like this...)

 (ornate ghost pipefish - not my pic (source: nevillecoleman.com.ar) - but shows how perfectly cammo'd he is!)

(these crinoid cling fish were squiggling away around a feather star on Gag island)

These are a few previous finds... a hairy fairy crab peering out from the outer folds on a purple barrel sponge...

...an teeny tiny emperor shrimp on a sea cucumber...

and the classic...  pygmy seahorse!