Some of the animals “likely arrived during recent El Niño phenomena” when ocean currents “temporarily reversed” direction, ...

Imagine diving into a crystal-clear ocean and suddenly coming face-to-face with a bustling metropolis built not by humans, ...

The animals prefer water depths between 15 and ... In large numbers, crown-of-thorns starfish can mow down wide swaths of coral reef. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN ...

The world is experiencing the most intense global coral bleaching event on record, with 84 percent of reefs experiencing heat ...

“Climate change poses an imminent threat to the world’s shallow-water coral reefs,” Julia Baum, a biologist at the University of Victoria who was not involved in this study, tells The Atlantic. “As ...

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse habitats in the oceans, and like the trees of a rainforest, the coral structures provide the structure of the ecosystem, within which other plants and animals live.

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 ...