Giant triton (snail) -> Crown-of-thorns starfish -> Hard coral One of the few predators of the crown-of-thorns starfish, the giant triton (Charonia tritonis) has evolved a tolerance to the ...

Bleached corals are essentially starving to death. Meanwhile, new research suggests that more than 40 percent of hard corals — those that build reefs, like the recently discovered colony in the ...

Covering nearly 133,000 square miles (345,000 square kilometers), the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef, home to more than 1,500 species of fish and 411 species of hard corals.

A closeup of a well-preserved Late Holocene hard pillar coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus), now genetically extinct along the Florida reef tract due to a disease outbreak in 2014.

Corals are animals, but many are powered by the tiny photosythetic algal plants within their cells; with this energy they are capable of building geological structures. Most corals are colonial ...

Coral reefs globally are facing unprecedented pressures and are particularly sensitive to climate change and extremes in temperature. Most hard corals grow thanks to a symbiotic relationship between ...

The coral reef systems of the Al Wajh lagoon on the Red Sea, the world's fourth largest barrier reef system, are estimated to host approximately 210 species of hard corals and 120 species of soft ...