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Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton. A coral "group" is a colony of very many genetically identical polyps. Each polyp is a sac-like animal typically only a few millimeters in diameter and a few centimeters in height.
A coral colony is a group of coral polyps — small, soft invertebrate — that live and grow together. The "mega" colony is made up of nearly one billion polyps, according to National Geographic ...
A coral reef is an underwater ecosystem characterized by reef-building corals. Reefs are formed of colonies of coral polyps held together by calcium carbonate. [1] Most coral reefs are built from stony corals, whose polyps cluster in groups. Coral belongs to the class Anthozoa in the animal phylum Cnidaria, which includes sea anemones and ...
The rate at which a stony coral colony lays down calcium carbonate depends on the species, but some of the branching species can increase in height or length by around 10 cm (4 in) a year (about the same rate as human hair grows).
Unlike a reef, which consists of many colonies, this coral is a single specimen that has grown continuously for centuries. “Just when we think there is nothing left to discover on planet Earth ...
Pavona clavus is a cream, yellow, brown, or pale grey coral typically forming columnar or club-shaped colonies, though it may also form flattened plates. [3] [4] The columns are generally smooth and uniform in size, typically measuring up to 20 cm (7.9 in) tall and 3–5 cm (1.2–2.0 in) in diameter. [3] They are capable of dividing but not ...
Diagram showing a coral polyp, its corallite, coenosarc and coenosteum Up : zoom on the skeletal cup of an Astrangia coral; Down : view of the skeleton of the whole colony, showing all the coralittes. A corallite is the skeletal cup, formed by an individual stony coral polyp, in which the polyp sits and into which it
M. dichotoma is a colonial hermatypic coral with a calcareous endoskeleton. They form colonies up to 60 cm wide, but clumps of colonies may be several meters across. They initially build as encrusting coral, adhering themselves to hard substrate.