the.com/coral
An animal that builds limestone cities, eats sunlight, and blushes white when it's dying.
means A hard, often colorful marine structure built up from the limestone skeletons of tiny colonial animals called polyps — and, by extension, the pinkish-orange color of that material.
from From Latin 'corallium,' borrowed from Greek 'korallion,' which referred to red coral fished from the Mediterranean. The deeper roots are murky — some have proposed a Semitic source, but this is uncertain. The word traveled into English through Old French 'coral,' long before anyone understood that these stony branches were the work of living animals rather than a kind of underwater plant or stone.
- living rock
- Tiny animals called polyps, not plants or stones
- solar powered
- Algae inside feed corals via photosynthesis
- ancient builders
- Great Barrier Reef visible from space
- bleach warning
- Stress expels their algae, turning them ghost white
- slow grind
- Some corals grow a centimeter per year
great barrier reef — largest coral reef system: 1,400 miles along australia's coast
red sea coral — between egypt and saudi arabia: highest biodiversity of stony corals
florida keys coral — only living coral barrier reef in continental us, near key west