Among the myriad creatures that populate our ocean, some stand out as having an outsized impact on the marine ...

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.

“Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.” Corals are marine invertebrates that live in communities of hundreds to thousands of identical, individual soft-bodied polyps. Each ...

This coral species, known as acropora hemprichii, grows in the shallow reefs of the Maldives in tapered branches which ...

Crucial habitats in underwater ecosystems, and harbingers of the damage inflicted by global warming on the world’s oceans, coral reefs epitomize the beauty—and the fragility—of marine life. But ...

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 ...

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system. It stretches over 2,300 kilometres along the coast of ...

Our Planet, the incredible new documentary series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, explores the beauty of life on Earth and highlights the threats that we pose to it. In the coastal seas episode, ...

Rising acidity reduces the rate at which reefs develop. Crucial to coral health are colorful algae called zooxanthellae. These algae live in coral polyps, providing coral with its bright color.

Most corals are colonial animals - superorganisms comprising lots of smaller organisms - made up of multitudes sea anemone-like coral polyps. In the reef-building "hard corals", the polyps sit in ...

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 ...