Disc Anemone

• It is, in essence, a coral that has lost its skeleton: its anatomy is that of a coral polyp, but its body is entirely soft.
• It can move very slowly and multiply by division, covering large areas of the reef.
• It competes for space with the hard corals by releasing chemical compounds, and on degraded reefs it can displace them entirely.
• It is neither an anemone nor a true coral: the corallimorpharians are a group apart, related to the stony corals but without a skeleton.
• Its body is a flat, fleshy disc with the tentacles reduced to small warts, quite unlike an anemone's appearance.
• It reproduces by fission and by budding, and in that way forms carpets that cover the substrate.
• It can displace stony corals on degraded or nutrient-enriched reefs, and that proliferation is taken as a symptom of poor reef health.
• It hosts zooxanthellae and supplements its diet by catching particles and small prey with its disc.

Habitat & environment

Shallow, sheltered areas of Indo-Pacific reefs

Sources consulted: Rüppell y Leuckart (1828); Fabricius y Alderslade; estudios de dominancia de coralimorfarios en arrecifes degradados