rharbo's Identifications

Orange or grapefruit sized (some but not most are still smaller). They are soft to the touch, squishy and full of water like a sponge. I could tear it in half with my fingers and fingernails if I wanted to. You can squeeze the water out of them but they are pretty dense even with their porosity, and heavy (for their size) because of the water they hold. The top comes up to these funny spires and sometimes they are tubes. The bottom is flat and slightly rounded. I see them on low tides but it doesn't have to be an extreme low tides. All are bright orange.

Photo license and credit belong to the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH), the Hakai Institute, and MarineGEO | http://specifyportal.flmnh.ufl.edu/iz/ | Field Number: BHAK-0846 | This observation is a part of the collaborative work between FLMNH, the Smithsonian Institution's Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO) and Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and the Hakai Institute