Orange-footed Sea Cucumber

• It feeds like an anemone rather than like a burrowing sea cucumber: it spreads its branched tentacles into the current and puts them into its mouth in turn, cleaning off the particles each one has caught.
• It supports a growing fishery in Canada, Iceland and Norway, driven by Asian demand, on a species that grows slowly and matures late.
• It undergoes seasonal evisceration: it expels its internal organs and regrows them, a process tied to the annual feeding cycle.
• It does not forage on the bottom: it filters. It spreads ten tree-like branched tentacles into the current, traps plankton on their mucus and takes the tentacles to its mouth one at a time, like someone licking their fingers.
• When disturbed it can eviscerate: it expels part of its internal organs through the cloaca and regrows them over the following weeks.
• It supports an important fishery in Canada and New England, almost all of it destined for the Asian market, and its exploitation grew very fast as tropical sea cucumbers were fished out.
• It is the most abundant sea cucumber in the North Atlantic and can reach enormous densities on current-swept bottoms.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - endoskeleton of scattered calcareous ossicles (echinoderm)

Habitat and environment

Rocky bottoms of the North Atlantic and the Arctic, from 0 to 400 m

Sources consulted: Gunnerus (1767) · Hamel y Mercier · Fisheries and Oceans Canada · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid