What is the Great Barrier Reef?
Tiny Builders, Giant Home
What is the Great Barrier Reef?
Off the coast of Australia, there's something so enormous you can see it from space — not a mountain, not a city, but something alive. It's called the Great Barrier Reef, and it's the biggest structure ever built by living creatures. But here's the wild part: the builders are tiny animals smaller than your fingernail.
The reef is made by coral polyps — soft, tube-shaped animals with tentacles that look like tiny sea anemones. Each polyp is about the size of a pencil eraser. They glue themselves to the ocean floor and build hard limestone skeletons around their bodies for protection, like wearing a permanent stone suit.
