A soft coral in pink, red or orange that inflates with water to feed at night and collapses to a rag by day.
A translucent, inflatable, tree-like soft coral in vivid red, pink, orange or purple, with the polyps grouped in bundles at the branch tips and conspicuous needle-like spicules supporting the branches. This species is described as branching in a spreading fashion with broken outlines and ten to twelve polyps per bundle. No published size or depth figure was found for it, so none is given.
Identification needs stating honestly. The genus contains more than 250 described species, most of them poorly characterised, and telling them apart depends on microscopic spicule structure. A species-level identification from a photograph is not defensible, and most of the times this name appears in dive literature it is a guess. Treat this as a representative Red Sea soft coral of its genus and the species name as provisional.
It has no symbiotic algae, so it depends entirely on catching plankton — largely phytoplankton, which is unusual — from moving water. It lives on current-swept walls, overhangs and reef edges. The colony inflates with water to feed and deflates to a limp blob when it is not, so the same colony looks completely different at different states of the tide. It feeds mainly at night and in strong current. That constant need for phytoplankton is also why it is notoriously impossible to keep in an aquarium.
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.
