Beadlet Anemone

• Beneath the crown of tentacles it has a ring of blue vesicles loaded with stinging cells, the acrorhagi, which it deploys to strike other anemones and drive them out of its territory in contests lasting hours.
• It is viviparous: it broods its offspring inside the gastrovascular cavity and expels through its mouth fully formed juveniles able to attach themselves.
• It contracts and holds water inside itself so as not to dry out through the hours of low tide, which lets it live on the upper shore.
• This is the red anemone everyone has seen turned into a jelly blob on the rocks at low tide: out of the water it retracts its tentacles so as not to dry out.
• It fights over territory. Below its tentacles it has a ring of blue vesicles called acrorhagi, loaded with stinging cells, which it inflates and presses against a neighbouring anemone until that one moves away or lets go of the rock.
• It is viviparous: it broods up to a hundred embryos inside its cavity and expels them fully formed, as miniature anemones. That is very unusual among anemones.
• It can move slowly by detaching and reattaching its pedal disc, at less than ten centimetres a day.
• One individual named Granny, collected on the east coast of Scotland by John Dalyell in 1828, lived in captivity for more than half a century.
• There are signs that its different colour forms might in fact be separate species.

Habitat & environment

Intertidal rocks of the north-eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean

Litter / clutch size

Up to a hundred embryos brooded in the body cavity

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinia_equina