Paul Naylor gets a fuzzy feeling whenever he sees a sea fan , as it ’ s both a sign of a healthy seabed and a warning that we should mind our fins !
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Pink sea fan Eunicella verrucosa
Paul Naylor gets a fuzzy feeling whenever he sees a sea fan , as it ’ s both a sign of a healthy seabed and a warning that we should mind our fins !
Like certain drinks , songs , aromas and so on , are there specific underwater sights or species that immediately give you a feel-good sensation ? For me , a vista or ‘ forest ’ of pink sea fans stretching out across the seabed is definitely one of them . Not only are the sea fans beautiful in themselves , but they send out the clear message that the seabed has not been damaged for a considerable time and is as nature intended .
A pink sea fan is a colonial soft coral that starts its bottom-living life after a drifting larva settles out from the plankton and develops into a single polyp on the seabed . This polyp reproduces asexually by budding , and the process continues to eventually form the fabulous fan-shaped colony . Growth of the colony is rapid at first , up to 10cm in its first year , and produces a single rod-like stem . Later , as the colony branches out , growth is slow and may only be about 1cm per year .
This means that the largest fans we see could be approaching 100 years old , hence
Sea fans are a favourite place for nursehounds to tie on their egg cases , although this case looks to have been bitten open by a predator
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This washed-up sea fan skeleton still had bleached remnants of polyps attached