Bright orange polyps on a hard skeleton, growing in caves and under overhangs because it carries no algae and feeds on plankton.
Clusters of bright orange to red tubular cups on a shared base, each cup more than 11 mm across, with colonies typically 10 to 30 cm over the rock. The skeleton is white and ribbed. When the polyps are open the tentacles are translucent yellow-orange and fully extended, which gives the colony a fuzzy, daisy-like look.
It has no symbiotic algae, so it does not need light, and it lives on shaded vertical walls, under overhangs, in caverns and on artificial structures, including in complete darkness. It feeds by catching zooplankton, and the polyps expand at night. It grows slowly, around three square centimetres a year.
Identification to species is not reliable in the field here. Four species of the genus are on the Galapagos list, two of them Galapagos endemics described in 1982, and those two are the more interesting animals. This species has smaller cups and a more compact encrusting habit than the other common one.
One thing to be careful about. This coral is a notorious invader in the Atlantic, where it smothers native sponges and corals, and the Atlantic story dominates what is written about it. In the eastern Pacific it is native, and the Galapagos checklist lists it as indigenous. The Cocos record could not be confirmed at species level in any accessible source and needs checking.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
