External characters
Massive, varying from bulbous encrusting to digitate or flabellate-digitate, thick irregular digits.
Colour
Bright yellow or orange/yellow alive, may be darker red-orange-yellow on deck.
Skeletal Characters
| Oscules | On sides of digits, prominent, irregular.In encrusting growth forms single apical oscules sit on the ends of bulbous processes |
| Texture | Firm, slightly compressible. |
| Surface_Ornamentation | Straited, irregularly ornamented, grooves, conules. |
| Ectosomal_Skeleton | membranous, with tips of peripheral spicules protruding and producing a microscopically hispid, and macroscopically conulose surface (the latter only slight however). Spicule tracts are more plumose near peripheral skeleton than in the choanosomal skeleton |
| Choanosomal_Skeleton | Sinuous-plumose tracts of styles, no fibres, halichondroid near the centre of the skeleton, mesohyl ranges from light to heavy collagen depending on thickness of lamellae/ digits. |
| Megascleres | Styles, straight, curved or sinuous, robust (500 -550 x 15 -20um). |
| Microscleres | nil. |
| Mudmap_Author | J Hooper |
| Mudmap_Editor | K Hall |
Distribution
In French Polynesia: Marquesas islands
Ecology and habitat
In a bay, on fringing reef / rocky slope.
