Sea Cucumber Skin Up Close! Bizarre & Beautiful!

Thelenota ananas Via Wikipedia commons. Photo by Nick Hobgood

Cool Crowdsourced Photo time! This week..some gorgeous closeups of the neat skin textures on tropical sea cucumbers!

Some of these give you an idea of how colorful and unusual the skin in sea cucumbers can be. This one is called  Thelenota rubolineata (the species name literally means "red lines"). This is an example of what the whole animal of one of the pics below looks like...

What do they feel like? Sort of soft and rubbery. Firm. And yes, people eat these species...

Here's a nice roundup of similar closeup photo essays of other echinoderms 

1. Here's the one for Up close Starfish! 
2. Another one showing close ups on Crinoids (aka Feather stars)
3. COLORS! in brittle stars! 
4. Crabs that live in sea cucumber anuses! here.
5. Worms & Snails that live on sea cucumbers! here. 

Below.. you will find many different close ups of the skin of sea cucumbers.

this one is Thelenota I think...

Some striking full body pics...