Giant Anemone

The giant anemone is a big Caribbean sea anemone that acts as a base station for its reef neighbours, with several fish and cleaner shrimps sheltering beside it and other fish coming to it to be cleaned.

It grips rock, shell or almost any other hard surface, in crevices of rock walls, wedged into coral rubble or with its base buried in sand, often partly or wholly out of sight, on shallow reefs, lagoons and inner reef flats.

It lives in the Caribbean, the West Indies, Bermuda, southern Florida and parts of the western Atlantic, from near the surface to about 30m. Bright shallow-water light matters to it, so it is rarely found deeper, and it favours spots with full-strength seawater. Colour varies widely and the tentacle tips are often a different shade from the rest.

Like other sea anemones it is a large solitary polyp with no skeleton, using a basal disc to crawl and dig itself in. Its fringing tentacles come in six or multiples of six. Most sea anemones eat plankton, but stinging tentacles can hold almost anything they catch, including quite big fish.

No clownfish live with this anemone, though some crabs and brittle stars are known to live alongside sea anemones.