This rather beautifully patterned creature is a featherstar (a really common starfish thing with feathery limbs). These beautiful animals abound in the indo pacific. They are pretty cool in their own right but if you look deeply enough you can find all sorts of tiny animals living inside them. You can see this squat lobster has actually chopped off a feather and is using it to try and hide his beautifully patterned pastel back.
Its not just crustaceans though. Relatively large animals like Ornate Ghost Pipefish or Seahorses will hide within their fronds. Here's another fish commonly found in featherstars, a tiny whitestripe clingfish, hiding among the fronds.
More topside stuff coming soon, bird and reptile fans. Unfortunately I trashed a camera the other day so I'm using mostly archive images for now, but in the bull pen we have terns, ducks, snakes and more snipe, together with some more underwater symbiotic weirdness.
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