Coral and Colonies
Go and find a piece of plate coral close to the surface and spend a minute looking closely between the coral fingers and amongst the polyps. Upon the surface and within the mucous layer, in the flesh and in the matrix of the coral skeleton, reside a fantastic collection of highly adapted, mutually independent symbiotic partners. These symbionts include representatives of all the major groupings of the tree of life. There are bacterial, archean, protozoan, fungal, algal and animal communities occurring throughout all levels of the coral colony. These genetically diverse populations themselves are intricately integrated with each other and the animal hosts into stable structures which we call coral colonies. A wide assortment of animals inhabits the complex microhabitat of the coral plate. These residents are often sculpted and coloured in ways that provide almost complete camouflage against the background of their particular host coral. The residents have comp...
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