World War 3 Has Already Begun

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Fluorescence.

©Paul o’Dowd 2013 Fluorescence You’ve heard the reactions of people who witness the Reef for the first time. “The colours are amazing!”, “The fish are so bright!”... The question is; how do many marine creatures manage to appear brighter than the ambient light would seem to permit. Pigments are chemicals which absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. Many of the colours we see around us are the result of pigments reflecting selected wavelengths and absorbing others. The energy associated with the absorbed light might then be used for other things. Plants appear green because the green part of the spectrum is not absorbed by the pigments that harvest the energy of sunlight. Instead, the wavelengths that make up the green part of the spectrum are reflected and that’s what we see. Some pigments though, absorb certain wavelengths only to instantly release that energy as an emission of light of a different colour. This is called, ...
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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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