They Find Me
Some things in life you don’t have to seek out. They know that they are meant for you, and they will find you. Junkies sometimes talk in these terms of their drug of choice; or people madly in love of their partner who was going to find them, no matter what; athletes of their sport, which found them, not the other way around.
For me, the sea cucumber anuses found me, not the other way around.
It started more than ten years ago in Okinawa, Japan, where I was living at the time, when my German dive buddy and I started joking about the asses of these cucumbers, and how they are shamelessly sticking them out into the open. I took a few pictures of the holothurian anuses, and I thought this was a good laugh, and it would be a one-off thing. But on the next dive, the same German dive buddy pointed at another cucumber, and I took another shot, and I still found the whole idea funny, and I never stopped since then.
Two factors also came to play to keep me shooting cucumber asses: Many echinoderms have really interesting, 60s psychedelic-like, fractal, Turing-pattern-ish, pretty skin patterns. These patterns often cover the whole animal, but a butt shot will also show these amazingly aesthetic patterns.
Then, it’s easy. I have one shot of a Spanish mackerel. They are rare, and very very fast. Sea cucumbers are not rare in most places in the tropics, and don’t move away at a speed even a fraction of a swimming speed of an out-of shape diver with too much gear causing him too much water drag.
These are the results of these photographic efforts:
I feel that this is not merely a series of somewhat unusual shots, but a photographic genre, the life of which depends on me, and on me alone. I can’t give up. There are others who contribute top shots (some shots in the Pinterest album are theirs), but the main push, the spiritual ownership of sea cucumber photography, is mine.
Video, Too
I had previously been featured on a popular science channel, and have shot a few videos of sea cucumber anal oscillations. These happen because the respiration of holothurians (sea cucumbers) happens through the anus. Look:
This is a new effort to popularize sea cucumber anuses. In this case, I didn’t actually shoot a video, but I took a photograph, and fed it into a deep fake app, which is available for free online. In fact, I tried a few such deep fake apps, but most refused to work with my sea cucumber anus picture, and claimed “no face detected”. Hard to argue. But one app, Wombo.AI decided that the cucumber’s ass was similar enough to a mouth, and rendered it singing “Baby Shark!”. Check it out:
