From the SE US here. Well in SE VA. Close enough. Still hardiness zone 8. Great post by the way.
I’ve only ever observed one anemone. Your data is pretty spot on. I had no idea what they were when I snapped shots of them, but I was highly intrigued by them. They were out of water at the time attached to a muscle, but there were still eye catching. Admittedly though it would’ve been easy to miss if I wasn’t watching mud crabs fight each other.
If I were to come across more I’d definitely snap shots of them, but the tide pools here are pretty swampy and walking across the mud risks disturbing small habitats. Speaking anecdotally, I think most places someone might happen across them here is kinda rare. The water is rarely clear.
Also, thanks for the ID confirmation! I want to see if I can find more now. I’m a huge fan of fellow Cnidarians, Scyphozoa. I like to ID Chrysaora chesapeakei from time to time. Those get many more observations around here. They float.
I also agree that Japan should be just waiting to explode. They have great coastline and references.
Here in Alaska, which you sadly omitted, sometimes I think people are not excited about documenting this group because they are confused about taxonomy. We sorely need an updated guide for the Eastern Pacific. We do have the website http://actiniaria.com/ but most of our printed sources are filled with outdated names. Possibly the closest we can get to an updated reference is https://molamarine.com/beneath-pacific-tides.html
I need to spend a bit of time with it again before taking pictures of cnidaria
Agreeing with all the above points, I find as a casual observer that many east-coast tide pools are relatively low in “charismatic” invertebrates like anemones, cephalopods, or large crabs. It’s probably a mix of looking in the wrong places and having an exaggerated sense of what a tide pool “should” look like from cartoons, but I remember being very disappointed in the seaweed, periwinkles, and “water bugs” (Anura maritima, an aquatic springtail that I kind of want to observe now that I know what it is).
Thank you Joefish for this very interesting analysis. One big incentive for uploading sea anemone observations is knowing that they will get identified. Thanks for all your IDs. As I learn the species name, I will dare to ID more other people’s observations too. I am glad inat is catching up in New Caledonia, although english langage is hampering some people involvment. I think that many japanes naturalist don’t use inat simply because it’s not in japanese.