On my recent Singapore trip, I visited a fish tank. To be more exact, it was an anemone aquarium as there were only 2 fish in the tank living symbiotically with the sea anemones. My eyes and camera were glued to the glass as the anemones swayed gently in the current as if waving at me. So I tried to capture their exquisite beauty in the photographs below for you:

Sea anemones are a group of water dwelling, predatory animals. They are named after the anemone, a terrestrial flower. A sea anemone is a polyp, attached at the bottom to the surface beneath it by an adhesive foot, called a pedal disk, with a column shaped body ending in an oral disk. The mouth is in the middle of the oral disk.

The internal anatomy of anemones is simple. Each have a stomach with a single opening to the outside. The opening functions as both a mouth and an anus: waste and undigested matter is excreted through it. Efficiency!

Anemones tend to stay in the same spot unless conditions become unfavourable to their survival, or if a predator attacks them. Anemones can ‘run away’ by releasing themselves from the substrate and use flexing motions to swim to a new location. These anemones seem quite content where they are, sitting on their respective rock-beds and greeting strangers with the subtle sways of their ‘arms’.