A branching sea fan set across the current on exposed Galapagos walls, carrying its own community of small animals.
Stiff, bushy, densely branched colonies with a conspicuously rough surface. The cups are armed with projecting hard spicules, so the whole colony looks and feels sandpapery or thorny, and that texture is the mark of the genus. Usually brown, tan, ochre or yellow-brown, with white polyps when they are out.
The other eastern Pacific gorgonians are separated by shape. This one is a bushy, three-dimensional, rough colony; the sea fans of the region are flat, smooth, brightly coloured and built in a single plane.
Two species of the genus appear on the Galapagos checklist. One was described from Elizabeth Bay on Isabela in 1941 and is known only from there, from 91 m, so it is not a species a diver will see; it is slender and about 10 cm tall. The other is a larger shallow-water species reaching about 25 cm across, but the 2016 revision of the genus records it only from the Gulf of California, mainland Mexico and Peru, and does not list the Galapagos at all. So the checklist and the revision disagree, and this entry stays at genus level for good reason.
The colonies feed on plankton on rocky reef in current. No reliable size or depth figure exists for a Galapagos animal, so none is given here.
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.
