Even when we think we know everything, or that we think we have a grasp on what species occur in our environment, we don’t,” ...

Coral polyps, the reef's building blocks, are tiny colonial animals that house symbiotic algae in their cells. As those algae photosynthesize—using light to create energy—each polyp is fueled ...

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes. Since before she could remember, Eva Llabrés was a ...

Beneath the soft bodies of scleractinian, or stony corals, polyps secrete a calcium carbonate skeleton, and it is this skeleton that becomes the foundation of coral reef ecosystems. Coral colonies ...

There they metamorphose, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, into a coral polyp. Those polyps clone themselves over and over again, eventually forming larger coral colonies that build reefs.

The larva grows into a coral polyp, then a colony that matures and releases larvae that colonize other rocks. In time, it helps to create one of nature’s most spectacular ecosystems: a coral reef.

But what exactly is coral bleaching, and why is this so damaging? We’ll explain everything you need to know, in a nutshell… Corals are tiny animals called a ‘polyps’, that typically live in large ...

Most corals are colonial animals - superorganisms comprising lots of smaller organisms - made up of multitudes sea anemone-like coral polyps. In the reef-building "hard corals", the polyps sit in ...

Parasphaerasclera mcfaddenae is a new species of soft coral that has a yellow center and long polyps with tentacles, according to a study published March 10 in Zootaxa, a scientific journal for ...