All Echinoderm Asses You Ever Wanted to See
A long time ago, three countries ago (Philippines, now; ‘Straya, before; The Land of the Plastic Smiles, before-before), in Okinawa, I took a photo of the anus of a sea cucumber. It’s kind of an obvious thing to do. These echinoderms (sea cucumbers, sea stars, sea urchins) don’t move very fast, and their skins are often covered in beautiful patterns. Something is usually missing though, a point of reference, when taking photos of these patterns on their own. These animals don’t have eyes, so why not use the butt-hole as a visual reference point? A lot of my friends found these pictures funny as well – photos of someone’s ass are always amusing, kind of, even if that someone is a marine invertebrate.
Since then, taking photos of echinoderm-anuses has remained a running gag for me, I do it almost every time when I dive with a camera with a macro lens mounted and when I see a nice sea cucumber.
Here is a Flickr album of all these echinodermassographs, you can see the series of photos by clicking on the first image. There are some true highlights! Check out the photo with the defensive adhesive strands coming out of a se a cucmber’s ass, and several examples of anal teeth (!), structures to defend the invertebrate against intruding parasites.
Probably the most unusual shot is the one of a crown-of-thorns starfish with two(!) anuses. Very rare, here it is (the shot is from Bolinao, Pangasinan province, in the Philippines):
A few weeks ago, I also managed to film one of these unusual crabs which live in the anal bulb of sea urchins, at a dive site very close to my new house. Very tricky to film – the constantly moving spines of the urchin mess with the auto focus.
A few years ago some of my shots were featured in a cool episode of “Gross Science”.
The producers of the feature were so kind to pay me for the use of these photos – I actually made money off echinoderm anus photography. Who else can claim that? Doesn’t this make me the most successful echinoderm anus photographer in the world?
