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The classification of corals has been discussed for millennia, owing to having similarities to both plants and animals. Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus described the red coral, korallion, in his book on stones, implying it was a mineral, but he described it as a deep-sea plant in his Enquiries on Plants, where he also mentions large stony plants that reveal bright flowers when under water in ...
General characteristics of a large marine ecosystem (Gulf of Alaska). Marine life, sea life or ocean life is the collective ecological communities that encompass all aquatic animals, plants, algae, fungi, protists, single-celled microorganisms and associated viruses living in the saline water of marine habitats, either the sea water of marginal seas and oceans, or the brackish water of coastal ...
Yellow longnose butterflyfish browsing on coral polyps. A corallivore is an animal that feeds on coral. Corallivores are an important group of reef organism because they can influence coral abundance, distribution, and community structure. Corallivores feed on coral using a variety of unique adaptations and strategies.
Corals that grow on reefs are called hermatypic, with those growing elsewhere are known as ahermatypic. Most of the latter are azooxanthellate and live in both shallow and deep sea habitats. In the deep sea they share the ecosystem with soft corals, polychaete worms, other worms, crustaceans, molluscs and sponges.
The biotic characteristics are mainly determined by the organisms that occur. For example, wetland plants may produce dense canopies that cover large areas of sediment—or snails or geese may graze the vegetation leaving large mud flats. Aquatic environments have relatively low oxygen levels, forcing adaptation by the organisms found there.
Over 10,000 [25] species of fungi are known from marine environments. [26] These are parasitic on marine algae or animals, or are saprobes on algae, corals, protozoan cysts, sea grasses, wood and other substrata, and can also be found in sea foam. [27] Spores of many species have special appendages which facilitate attachment to the substratum ...
Many animals can glow in the dark. In a new study, scientists report that deep-sea corals that lived 540 million years ago may have been the first animals to glow, far earlier than previously thought.
Coral reefs deliver ecosystem services for tourism, fisheries and shoreline protection. The annual global economic value of coral reefs has been estimated at anywhere from US$30–375 billion (1997 and 2003 estimates) [14] [15] to US$2.7 trillion (a 2020 estimate) [16] to US$9.9 trillion (a 2014 estimate). [17]