About Alcyonium glomeratum (Hassall, 1843)
Commonly called red sea fingers, Alcyonium glomeratum (Hassall, 1843) has a similar shape to Alcyonium digitatum, but is usually blood red or rust coloured. Its finger-shaped lobes are slender, and can reach up to thirty centimetres in length. Its polyps are white, and each polyp has eight pinnate tentacles, which give the entire colony a feathery appearance when the polyps are extended. This coral is distributed along the west coast of Britain and Ireland, ranging north to western Scotland and south to the Bay of Biscay. It is quite a localized species, but can be abundant at some sites. It has also been recorded on the Inshcape-2 wreck off the east coast of the United Arab Emirates, in the Gulf of Oman (Indian Ocean), opposite Khurr-Fakkan City. A photograph of this coral from this site was taken by Yahia Mokhtar in December 2014, at a seabed depth of 22 metres. This coral inhabits bedrock in gullies, crevices, and under overhangs within sheltered locations of the sublittoral zone, at depths greater than ten metres. It prefers open water on the lee side of islands and rocks.
