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 creature consisting mostly of a stomach topped by a mouth, a bit like a hungry toddler. Corals take a very long time to grow.

Scientists were stunned when they discovered that a shipwreck shadow they thought they had spotted under their boat last ...

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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 ...

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 ...

The vast ocean depths are full of surprises, and in 2024 marine scientists stumbled across a giant coral reef that had ...

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 ...

Visible from space, this titanic colony is home to nearly one billion coral polyps. These tiny, genetically identical organisms work together to form a single entity capable of surviving in an ...

Objects and Ideograms has developed a method to 3D-print calcium carbonate, which can be used as a scaffold for the growth of coral polyps and other aquatic life. Coral carbonate utilises its ...