How do corals build entire reefs from tiny animals?
Coral's Copy Machine
How do corals build entire reefs from tiny animals?
Stand at the edge of a coral reef and you're looking at something completely wild: an underwater city the size of several countries, built by animals smaller than your fingernail. No blueprints, no construction crews, no planning meetings — just billions of tiny creatures doing their thing, and somehow they've made the largest living structures on Earth.
Meet the builder: a coral polyp. It's a soft-bodied animal shaped like a hollow tube, with a ring of stinging tentacles around its mouth. Picture a tiny sea anemone — same family, same body plan. One polyp is almost nothing, barely visible. But here's the trick: they never work alone.
