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| Encyclopedia of Life |
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Visit this species on the Encyclopedia of Life to find out more!
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Lifestyle
Many people think we are one giant rock, but really we are animals! Each mass of coral that you see is actually hundreds of tiny animals living together. Each tiny animal is called a polyp. Hundreds of coral polyps (PAUL-lip) living together are called a colony.
Porites coral is the best and the biggest coral! Like jellyfish, we have a sac-like body with a mouth and tentacles on top and are in a group of animals called cnidarians (snid-DARE-eeyans). Unlike jellyfish, though, we are reef builders! We make our own skeletons and wear them like our armor adding to it every year, and growing grow bigger. We only live in the top most layer of our skeleton and the old skeleton underneath is what makes the reef.
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Fun Facts
Check me out! I'm totally huge, dude! That's right, me and my little coral polyp friends make up one of the biggest corals on Earth! One of our colonies (or groupings) can grow over 25 feet (8 meters) high. But we grow very, very slowly, less than half an inch (9mm) per year! If you happen across a giant colony of our species, it can be up to 1,000 years old! There are 115 different species of us, and our colonies can be flat or finger-like.
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Menu
We are animals so we need to eat food. We use our tentacles to catch food floating in the water and then bring it to our mouths to eat. We catch zooplankton, tiny animals that live in the sea. We only feed at night! So during the day you won't see our polyps. But if you come to the reef at night, you can see our polyps feeding. It makes our colony look fuzzy.
Although we love zooplankton, there actually isn't enough of it for us to eat in the tropical waters where we live. We still can grow super big because we also have plants that live inside our bodies! A special algae called Zooxanthellae (ZOO-zann-thelly) live in our cells and use photosynthesis to make food for themselves. They share this food with us and in return we give the Zooxanthellae a safe place to live. This symbiotic, or close, relationship helps both of us, so it's mutualistic.
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Threats
We are in a lot of trouble and reefs are in great danger. 20% of the reefs in the world have been destroyed. Even more are under threat now. This is because of humans! They dump waste and poisons in the oceans that make us sick. Because of climate change, the oceans are also getting warmer, and that is also making us sick. To matters worse, humans sometimes dump sand on us to make beaches or destroy us to build things on land. This is bad news indeed. We make the reef and if you kill us, you kill all the creatures that live on the reef.
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