JPEG 61K Explore almost any rocky coastline and you find sea anemones. They are found in the tropics as well as at the poles, attached to hard surfaces such as rocks, shells and submerged timbers.
Anemone is a Greek word meaning wind-flower.
Sea anemones look like flowers and may be red, green, orange, brown, white or any combination of these colors. In the last century, the anemone was a source of confusion for both tidepool explorers and scientists. It seems that no one was really sure if it was a plant or an animal. While the anemone looks like a flower, it also does things like an animal, such as eat other animals and move about. The tentacles have special capsules found on the tips which sting fish, shrimp, crabs, snails, sea urchins and small swimming an imals called zooplankton.