Photo by Nataraj Metz
I always knew that coral was alive, but I never imagined it as a baby, or as a group of babies, swimming around in the ocean, away from their reefs. But that’s what happens. Baby coral, in their larval form (which, according to Science Daily looks like “an egg with hairs”) search their surroundings to find a nice coral reef to settle in and grow up. The question is, how do they find their new home?
In a recent study published in PLoS ONE, Dutch scientists have discovered that coral larvae do this by using sound. It is not clear how they detect sound, but it is very important to understand how they operate in order to help maintain the world’s threatened coral reefs.
Read the Science Daily article.
