Droopy Gorgonian Sea Plume - Needs Water??

Gorgonian Sea Plume (Pseudopterogorgia sp)

by B. N. Sullivan

We were swimming along the pretty reefs off the coast of West Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands, looking for things to photograph.  I spotted this Gorgonian Sea Plume at the edge of a patch reef.  The first thing I noticed was that it was quite tall -- with a height  of about two meters.  But the thing that really struck me was how droopy its branchlets looked. The spontaneous thought that popped into my head was that it looked like a large house plant that someone forgot to water!

That was a silly thought, of course, and it made me chuckle to myself at the time.  But when we were reviewing the photos I had taken on that dive, Jerry looked at this one and immediately said, "Hmm, needs water."  I told him I had thought the same thing when we were out there on the reef, and we both had a laugh about that.  So, from the start, our title for this photo has been "Needs Water."