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.

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 ...

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

In the reef-building "hard corals", the polyps sit in a carbonate coral skeleton, which over time builds the fabric of the reef. Coral reefs are like cities under the sea. The structure of the ...

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.

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.

Now, to keep Florida’s reef alive, scientists have to breed corals almost entirely in labs on land, where the water is clean and comfortably warm. Margaret Miller, a coral reproductive biologist, says ...

An individual coral is a polyp. It’s a very small and simple ... On average they grow between 0.5 and 2cm per year. The reefs we see today have been growing over the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.

Without healthy coral reefs, the islands wouldn’t even exist ... Sometimes as small as a pencil tip, polyps make up the coral ...