A loose colony of small rounded animals, orange to yellow, sitting slightly apart from one another and connected only by a thin sheet at the base. Each keeps its own two siphons and its own filtering basket, and the patch as a whole reaches about 8 cm (3 in).
Colonial ascidians are usually described as if colony formation were one thing, but this genus shows how partial it can be: the animals bud from a shared base, so they are clones, yet almost nothing else is held in common. Species in this family are separated on internal anatomy rather than on appearance, so a photograph rarely settles a name - which is worth stating on a page like this. What the diver can rely on is the habit: small orange buttons in a loose group, on shaded rock, each visibly breathing on its own.
- small rounded animals sitting separately but linked by a basal sheet
- orange to yellow, each animal with two visible siphons
- grows in a loose patch, not a solid crust
- colonies up to 8 cm across
