For divers in tropical waters feather stars are a common sight. Almost all around the world feather stars bring colour to the under water environment. Despite its nice colours divers normaly do not pay too much attention to these animals. We are more likely to pay attention to all the fish around us; search for the bog animals and leave the feather stars on its own. We think of it as less interesting animals. But this means that we will miss a number of surprising meetings.
We already made a lot of dives in tropical water. Diving the tropics has a magical attraction to us and a lot of other divers. During our tropical dives we already encountered lot of beautiful stuff. This time we see strangely formed “sticks” that move patiently with the swell. Not really exciting objects to stand still with we think. No, we rather swim further to that school off fish or to that beautiful wreck. Until the time we have a dive guide that will stop to watch these “sticks”. He defines them to us as sea whips.
During our last dives all we saw was sand. Where have we ended up this time? No colorful reefs, no beautiful coral gardens, only dull looking sand. This is not what we expected for this trip. We heard many enthusiastic stories from other divers about these dive sites. Could it be that diving on a sandy bottom is really worthwhile? We decided to rely on our guide and continued diving. Fortunately for the next couple of weeks we realized that there really are a lot of different animals living on sandy bottoms. The only thing to do is watch out for them very carefully.
During our search for small creatures we noticed that you van find loads of creatures living on Echimodermata. On starfish, cushion starfish, sea cucumbers, sea-urchins and sea apples we found a lot of small, beautiful but well camouflaged guests. Join us in our search!
