These beautiful animals, commonly called Feather Dusters, are actually a type of segmented worm, belonging to a class of animals called sabellids. The animal embeds it body into the coral, then extends these feather-like gills into the water through its parchment tube. The gills are about an inch in diameter, and extract both oxygen and food from the water. As pictured here, they tend to grow in clusters.

When disturbed by either a flash of light or a sudden swirl of water, the sabellids instantly retract their delicate gills back into the tube, transforming themselves temporarily into a dull-looking cluster of tubes. Thus, a photographer must approach them slowly, and can only take one picture of tdeways in an underwater crevasse. Then, by aiming the camera straight up towards the sun, I maximized the background light to balance to powerful strobe light of the camera. This photograph was taken in the Solomon Islands.