Garden eel

Colonies of Red Sea garden eels carpet the sandy lagoon floor at Shaab Sharm, with hundreds of individuals extending their upper bodies from individual burrows to filter passing zooplankton from the gentle current. The colony creates a constantly shifting visual effect — each eel retracts fully into its burrow as divers approach and re-emerges once the perceived threat passes, producing a ripple of disappearance and reappearance across the colony. They are permanently territorial, spending their entire adult lives within a metre of their burrow entrance.