---
title: Tube-dwelling anemone (Ceriantharia)
scientific_name: Ceriantharia
common_name: Tube-dwelling anemone
rank: Order
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:14:19.992Z
tags: Tube-dwelling anemone, Ceriantharia, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/tube-dwelling-anemone
---

# Tube-dwelling anemone (*Ceriantharia*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Order
- **Scientific name:** Ceriantharia
- **Body shape:** Invertebrate - Not a fish - coral, mollusc, crustacean, echinoderm and other invertebrate groups.
- **Species listed here:** 2

## How to recognise this group

- tentacle crown emerging from soft sediment
- two distinct tentacle whorls, outer long and widely spread
- smaller, upright inner tentacles near central mouth
- rapid withdrawal into buried fibrous tube when disturbed
- visible colours often translucent white, brown, or purple

The animal weaves itself a sleeve and lives inside it, and it is not an anemone at all.

Tube-dwelling anemones sit on their own branch of the cnidarians, some way off from the true anemones they were named after. There is no foot to glue down with. The body is long, soft and worm-like, and it lives buried upright in sediment with only the top showing: two rings of tentacles doing two different jobs, a wide outer skirt of long ones spread flat across the sand to catch whatever drifts in, and a short inner tuft around the mouth that takes the food off them and passes it down.

The tube is built from a cell type found in no other animal. Ptychocysts are capsules that discharge a long, pleated, sticky thread, and the animal fires them by the million and mats the threads together into a felt, layer on layer, worked through with mucus and sand. The result is a soft fabric sleeve that runs deeper into the sediment than the animal itself is long, and it keeps patching and extending that sleeve for the whole of its life. Nothing else in the sea builds this way.

The sleeve is also the escape hatch, which is why these are so hard to find. The whole animal drops down it at the first shadow, faster than you can register the movement, and what is left on the surface is a rim of gray felt that looks like nothing at all. Approach one carelessly and you will never know it was there.

They belong to the sand rather than the reef: flats, rubble and seagrass off the edge of the coral, from shallow water down well past the good light. Night is when they are out, tentacles spread and motionless, and they often fluoresce, so a blue torch will pick one out of the sediment from meters away when white light shows you an empty bottom.


## Species (2)

- [Banded Tube Dwelling Anemone (Pachycerianthus maua)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/tube-dwelling-anemone/banded-tube-dwelling-anemone)
- [Lilith's Tube Anemone (Arachnanthus lilith)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/tube-dwelling-anemone/liliths-tube-anemone)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/tube-dwelling-anemone)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*