Blog: An Introduction to Coral Reefs
If you ask people about their bucket-list highlights, many of them will tell you they dream of seeing the Great Barrier Reef. Despite this, a lot of people don’t realise exactly what they’re dreaming of. So, what are coral reefs?
Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?
It’s easy to mistake coral reefs as beautiful, colourful rocks or mystical underwater plants. But what you’re actually looking at is a colony of animals all living and working together - a bit like the ants or bees of the underwater world.
If you look up ‘coral reefs’, the dictionary will tell you they are “a hard stony substance secreted by certain marine coelenterates as an external skeleton, typically forming large reefs in warm seas.” But what does that MEAN?! Reading that, it’s no wonder why coral is one of the most misunderstood creatures in the animal kingdom!
So put away your dictionary because here’s a clear and simple introduction to coral reefs.
What are coral reefs?
So let’s take a journey into a day in the life of coral. First of all, If I asked you to imagine a coral animal, would you know what it looked like? Trying to picture one coral from this:
Picture Credit: The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey
…is about as easy as trying to see one person in this:
"Just Around The Corner | HSBC" by Staudinger + Franke, mladen penev is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Picture sourced from Wikimedia Commons
Coral up close
Zooming right in, an individual coral animal is called a coral polyp. It looks a bit like an upside down jellyfish. Like most animals, it can move, feed and reproduce.
Corals are part of a group of animals called Cnidarians, which live underwater and have special stinging cells.
For corals, these stinging cells are in their tentacles and help them catch their prey.
Polyps live together in large groups, similar to how you live in a house with your family. This is called a coral colony.
Picture Credit: Shaun Wolfe / Coral Reef Image Bank
The coral colony lives in a group of many other colonies, like how many families make up a neighbourhood.
These neighbourhoods of colonies are the coral reefs we know and love.
Types of coral
Hard Coral
Corals come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Some corals, like massive coral, have hard skeletons and grow into giant structures. These act like building blocks of entire reef ecosystems. They are accurately named “hard coral” and are often mistaken for rocks. Generally speaking, they are very slow growing and take a long time to recover from damage.
Picture Credit: Brook Peterson / Coral Reef Image Bank