Artist’s View – Secrets of the Salish Sea

You’ll find this flower-like anemone just beneath your keel in sheltered mud-bottomed bays. While some anemones have characteristics more like plants, this one is an animal. It looks more like a tube worm, but this creature is actually related to jellyfish. This might seem confusing, but to me it just shows the complexity of the underwater world we rarely see. It’s one reason why I enjoy writing this page.

These animals appear to have stout tubes below their tentacles waving in currents as they search for bits of food to snag—in reality, they are actually soft and vulnerable. To protect themselves, they burrow into the mud and generate a fibrous string-like material that they weave around themselves, almost like they’re knitting a sock. This can extend from above the surface down beside them into the mud as deep as three feet. It’s a woven structure they live in, safe from predators.

When one threatens, the anemone quickly pulls itself down into the protective tube.

While many anemones have stout fans of tentacles and large bodies holding them up into the current, this species relies on the mud substrate and a house of its own making. When its main predator, the giant nudibranch, grazes on the anemone’s tentacles, it also lays its eggs right on the outside of the anemone’s tube, putting the young’s first meal close at hand. You might think this would mean the end of the anemone, but nature has provided tentacles aplenty, so both species survive. The anemone commonly lives up to 10 years and often congregates in colonies that resemble flower-filled meadows, the tentacles waving as blossoms in a gentle breeze. Flowers they are definitely not, animals they certainly are.