An anemone that lets go and swims.
Almost everything in this group spends its life stuck to one rock. This one holds on weakly and by choice, and when it wants to leave it releases the foot and swims off by beating its four hundred-odd tentacles in waves, like a bad haircut going somewhere. It is slow and it is not elegant, but it is unmistakable, and there is nothing else on this reef that does it.
The other trick is what happens under attack. It throws off tentacles, which go on writhing where they fall while the animal leaves - and those discarded tentacles can regrow into whole new anemones. Losing a piece of yourself and having the piece become a second individual is a decent return on a bad afternoon.
It carries symbiotic algae in its tissue like a coral does, so a fair part of its food comes from sunlight, and it takes small animals with the tentacles for the rest.
It is small, under fifteen centimeters across, and it lives on seagrass and rubble in shallow water. The sting is mild by anemone standards and will not do more than tingle on a hand, but the animal itself is easily hurt: lifting one to make it perform tears tentacles off, and the fact that they regrow is not a reason to do it.
- swims by beating its tentacles, unlike any other anemone here
- small, under 15 cm across, on a short column
- tentacles banded or tipped paler
- found on seagrass and rubble, often detached
