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 ...

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.

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,” said Declan Morrissey, a zoologist at the Smithsonian.

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 ...

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 ...

Corals are colonial organisms made up of individual polyps, each 1–3 mm in diameter, that are connected to one another via a thin layer of tissue (Figure 2). The connection between polyps allows ...

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.

For instance. multiple types of bacteria may help coral polyps in the same way, such as making sure the coral-building creatures get a key nutrient. With so much diversity, some bacteria may ...

Cryopreservation technology preserves genetic coral diversity over decades and even centuries at Mote's Sarasota facility.

We’ll explain everything you need to know, in a nutshell… Corals are tiny animals called a ‘polyps’, that typically live in large colonies. Similar to a sea anemone, a polyp has a squidgy body, with a ...