Among the myriad creatures that populate our ocean, some stand out as having an outsized impact on the marine environment—shaping and maintaining habitats that themselves sustain countless other forms ...

The coral, a communal organism comprising millions of animals called polyps, is 34 meters wide and 32 meters long — and so large it can be seen from space. A typical coral reef is made of many ...

Such diversity may be a kind of “ecological insurance” for reefs, Galand said. For instance. multiple types of bacteria may help coral polyps in the same way, such as making sure the coral ...

Time-lapse video shows how a mushroom coral polyp pulses and inflates, flinging its soft body into micro-hops to slowly move itself to a new location.

Polyps collectively bulge, branch ... “It can guide your hypotheses for what you might see in the real world.” Coral reefs have been around for millions of years, and many of today’s living reefs are ...

Those polyps clone themselves over and over again, eventually forming larger coral colonies that build reefs. That’s how typical reef-building corals, like the iconic elkhorn and staghorn ...

Coral reefs are made up of colonies of hundreds to thousands of tiny individual corals, called polyps. These marine invertebrate animals have hard exoskeletons made of calcium carbonate, and are ...

An individual coral is a polyp. It’s a very small and simple ... On average they grow between 0.5 and 2cm per year. The reefs we see today have been growing over the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.

Without healthy coral reefs, the islands wouldn’t even exist ... Sometimes as small as a pencil tip, polyps make up the coral ...

Our Planet, the incredible new documentary series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, explores the beauty of life on Earth and highlights the threats that we pose to it. In the coastal seas episode, ...