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

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 ...

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.

Those polyps clone themselves over and over again, eventually forming larger coral colonies that build reefs. That’s how typical reef-building corals, like the iconic elkhorn and staghorn ...

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

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 ...

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, ...