Meet the invertebrates.

A daytime hunter and master shapeshifter, Hawaiʻi's most commonly seen octopus can change color and texture in under a second.

A living fossil whose ancestors swam alongside dinosaurs, the nautilus drifts through deep reefs in a perfect spiral shell.

A thumb-sized squid that hides in plain sight using bioluminescent bacteria to erase its own shadow under the moon.

A beautiful but dangerous predator that fires a venomous harpoon to paralyze fish — and whose toxins inspire modern medicine.

Treasured for its glossy spotted shell, the tiger cowrie polishes its own surface with a fleshy mantle that wraps the shell completely.

Living solar panels of the reef, giant clams grow up to four feet across by farming algae inside their colorful mantles.

The largest nudibranch in the world, this brilliant red sea slug swims by undulating its body like a flamenco dancer's dress.

A prized Hawaiian limpet that clings to wave-pounded lava rock — a delicacy so dangerous to harvest it is called "the fish of death."

Endemic to Hawaiʻi, this clawless lobster relies on long spiny antennae and a powerful tail-flick to escape predators in reef caves and overhangs.

A flat, shovel-shaped lobster that wedges into reef cracks by day and shuffles across the bottom hunting clams and snails by night.

Named for the seven large red spots on its cream-colored shell. A powerful snail-cracker that becomes toxic from the food it eats.

A pair-bonded reef predator that hunts only sea stars, flipping them upside-down and eating them slowly over days.

A red-and-white striped cleaner shrimp with long white antennae that runs a grooming station for fish on the reef.

A purple-spined urchin with a habit of decorating itself with shells, algae and debris — and a powerful tool against invasive seaweed.

A coral-eating sea star covered in venomous spines. Population outbreaks can devastate reefs across the Indo-Pacific.

Sand-eating janitors of the reef. These soft-bodied echinoderms can defend themselves by ejecting their own internal organs.

One of the most common reef-builders in Hawaiʻi — a colony of thousands of tiny animals working as one.

Brilliantly colored colonial polyps that carpet tidepools and lower reef walls — and contain one of the deadliest natural toxins ever discovered.

Stinging flowers of the reef. Solitary cousins of corals — gentle to look at, deadly for plankton and small fish.

Translucent ghosts of the open ocean — 95% water, no brain, no heart, and pulsing through the sea for over 500 million years.

A small, cube-shaped jelly with a powerful sting that arrives at Oʻahu's south shores like clockwork — 8 to 10 days after every full moon.

An amber-orange jelly with frilly oral arms and trailing tentacles — a slow, hypnotic predator of plankton and small fish.

Not a true coral, but a stinging hydroid that delivers a fiery burn to anyone who brushes against it on the reef.

A tube-dwelling worm that unfurls a spectacular feathery crown to filter plankton — and snaps it back into hiding in a fraction of a second.