Corals hard and soft dot the western rim of Beting Bemban Besar, where the reef flat peters out from a spongy centre to a dense bedlam of rubble, seagrass and colourful cnidarians. Table corals are not uncommon here, but at this depth, the colonies appear to be able to grow only in breadth and not in height, forming low antlers that seldom break the rippled surface.
Intertidal octocorals seem to suffer no constraints in size, having only to endure the indignity of collapsing into flacid heaps of extracellular matrices when the waters swing low. Where they remain submerged, autozooids with eight pinnuled tentacles continue to stretch out from the leathery tissue to capture the day's first waves of warm photons.
In other colonies, the polyps are so small and packed they resemble the fuzzy buds of cauliflorous vegetables. The alcyoniid offers few, if any, distinct points of focus, for the zooids protrude from every lobe and process to form a hazy agglomeration of soft heads that roll with the tide and dance with such grace it is near impossible to pin down the fragile beauty of these sessile bodies in irresistible motion.
Comments