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 ...

The polyps produce a hard outer skeleton made of calcium carbonate, each laying down a hexagon-shaped foundation. This grows by up to 10 centimetres a year and the coral develops into ... dimensional ...

Coral reefs consist of hundreds of thousands of coral polyps - marine animal invertebrates with hard calcium carbonate ...

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 ...

The amount of new calcium carbonate being added by coral reefs is at least half, and in some places 70 percent lower, than it was thousands of years ago. Biologists have long sounded the alarm for ...

They grow very slowly and make a hard outer shell by extracting calcium carbonate from seawater, then fuse together to make larger colonies. Coral reefs may only cover 0.2% of the seafloor ...