With the reef fish & creature identification books pretty much memorized, I still get excited when finding something new or rare. Water-time has been very hard to come by lately due to these %$^&#! persistent high winds. Fortunately, the last time I went reef-hopping there were small coral heads just packed with vibrant reef life.
I always take anemones as a sign of a healthy reef and these heads were full of them... giant anemones, corkscrew anemones, knobby anemones, branching anemones…
Although not abundant in this area, there was one 8” sun anemone (with its resident sun anemone shrimp).
A resident juvenile queen angelfish could be found at every stop… teeny, hyper & hard to photograph!
These shallow heads provide the perfect nursery for baby fish.
Rosy blennies are very camouflaged here and sometimes hard to spot.
A curious spotted eel poked his head out to check me out.
These guys always have banded coral shrimp hanging out nearby for grooming.
Aside from fish, I now know where to look and find the creatures that thrive on filtering nutrients from ocean currents. Great star coral forms a textured, green “lawn” and can be found with open or closed polyps. They pack themselves so tightly together they look polygonal!
Hydroids are often found in rocky areas, dead reefs or shipwrecks. Each type has unique symmetries and delicate branching patterns and this slender feather hydroid was new to me… if they look like they might sting, it’s because they do!
Corallimorphs are also individual animals that clump together in colonies.
I see these pretty green and blue types often, but was excited to find an orange color variation of warty corallimorphs with their funky spiked tentacles.
These are rarer to find and they are usually stuck in some deep corners of the reef that make them hard to photograph, which I spent a lot of time trying to do. To my surprise I came across a huge bed of warty corallimorphs on the next reef! They were big at about 3” each and very interesting to be able to study a bit more closely.
After a good string of reef creature findings, there were a few creatures I have yet to identify:
This lone, white round polyp (??) resembles a corallimorph sized animal…
…these mystery “hanging bells” (??) I have seen once before…
(UPDATE: these are tulip snail egg sacks)
…these starburst shaped critters (??), seen in clumps and singles, look like some type of large (1”) zoanthids…
(UPDATE: these are encrusting gorgonians)
…and this bright green algae (??) had fuzzy round heads reminiscent of dandelions.