Hey!! Welcome to the Coral Center, which is our home for coral. In this page, you will know a lot more about coral than when you came to it. Do you want to know a few coral types? Well, pipe coral, blue coral, umberella coral, sea fan coral, sea whip coral, sea pen coral, and sea pansie coral are a few. Did you know that there are 2500 kinds of coral living on earth?

        The first thing you should know about coral, is that it appears in many forms. Also, baby corals are called "planula." Also, when people think about corals, they normally think of the stony kind, which is very hard. The planulas are a type of larvae, from which the eggs rapidly develop. A planula is about the size of a pinhead. The planula finds a favorable spot to settle, so it does choose wisely.

        Also, polyps are the coral itself. The polyps of soft corals are smaller than their stony family. The skeletons of some coral are made of hard bits of limestone. The stony corals are actually not all the same size and shape. The Sea Anemone's polyps are similar to the stony corals'. The coral polyps actually help to remove sediment from the water, but can only remove so much. Corals that grow in well lit areas, without sediment, grow tall and strong. Where sediment is heavy, coral growth is stunted.

Fun Coral Fact: Biologists believe that plants and polyps depend on each other!

Now, back to the "lesson."

        Zooxanthellae are the "coral helpers." They help the coral to remove waste by thriving on it. Remember, if a coral doesn't remove its waste, then it could suffer or even die. Without the zooxanthellae, massive coral reefs couldn't develop. By the way, zooxanthellae are yellowish sphere cells.

        The sea whips and fans may obtain a height of three feet.

        Coral has been around a long time. The earliest coral fossils and skeletons appear in the Cambrian layer of the rock, which dates to about five million years ago. Not all ancient corals developed coral reefs. The name of one of the corals that lived as a solitary coral is a rugosite.