the.com/alcyonium
Dead man's fingers: a soft coral that looks like a drowned hand waving from the rocks.
means A genus of soft coral (and the common name for its fleshy, lobed colonies) that grows attached to rocks and shells in cold ocean waters.
from From Greek 'alkyonion,' a name the ancients gave to various spongy sea-growths, itself tied to 'alkyon' — the kingfisher of myth, Alcyone, who was turned into a bird and whose nest, sailors believed, floated on the sea and calmed it. The word drifted from bird to brooding nest to the strange spongy sea-matter washed ashore, long before naturalists pinned it to this particular coral.
- nickname origin
- colonies resemble pale, bloated fingers at low tide
- classification
- colonial polyps, not a single animal
- texture
- soft and rubbery, no stony skeleton like hard corals
- habitat
- clings to rocks in cold, temperate North Atlantic waters