What is branching coral called?
Description: Branching corals (also called arborescent, arboreal or ramose corals) branch like a tree. They grow from a base or trunk and their branches have projections of their own.
What are the three types of coral reefs?
The three main types of coral reefs are fringing, barrier, and atoll. Schools of colorful pennantfish, pyramid, and milletseed butterflyfish live on an atoll reef in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The most common type of reef is the fringing reef. This type of reef grows seaward directly from the shore.
Is branching coral hard or soft?
Hard corals come in a variety of growth forms. Some examples of these growth forms are branching corals, plate or sheet-forming corals, encrusting corals, and massive or boulder corals. Each polyp produces its own skeletal material and sits in a pitted area of the skeleton known as a corallite.
What are the 2 main types of coral?
There are two main types of corals — hard and soft.
What does branching coral look like?
Branching corals are characterized by having numerous branches, usually with secondary branches. This large field of branching corals belonging to the family Acroporidae was observed in the French Frigate Shoals, one of the many reefs that make up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands chain.
What causes branching corals?
Coral reefs begin to form when free-swimming coral larvae attach to submerged rocks or other hard surfaces along the edges of islands or continents. If a fringing reef forms around a volcanic island that sinks completely below sea level while the coral continues to grow upward, an atoll forms.
What type of coral is in the Great Barrier Reef?
hard corals
There is a multitude of different kinds of coral on the Great Barrier Reef, including hundreds of species of both hexacorals (hard corals) and octocorals (sea pens, blue corals, soft corals and sea fans). Hard corals can be further separated into two sub-groups.
What type of coral is most commonly harvested?
The most common type of coral harvested that is sold is known as red coral since it is believed that this type of coral is the most precious of all types of coral.
Which zone of the reef is closest to the shore?
The back reef is the part of the reef closest to shore, while the fore reef is farther out to sea. If you were scuba diving and swimming away from land, you first would encounter the reef flat, a relatively shallow zone of the back reef located closest to the shore.
Where are branching corals found?
The branch coral (Acropora florida) is a species of acroporid coral found in the southwest and northern Indian Ocean, the central Indo-Pacific, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan and the East China Sea, Cook Islands and the oceanic west Pacific Ocean.
What are the differences between branches of corals?
Corals grow in several unique forms, but none are more recognizable than branching species. Coral branches can be long and dedicated or thick, robust fronds. But all branching corals have one thing in common — they create complex three-dimensional habitat, home to 25 percent of all tropical fish.
How do you identify Seriatopora coral?
Seriatopora is a small, branching coral that has fuzzy polyps. The branches can have smooth branch tips or pointed branch tips. Identify this coral by looking at the placement of each polyp: in Seriatopora coral, all the polyps line up in a neat row or series.
What is the difference between a plate and a boulder coral?
Boulder refers to any massive or rounded corals, such as some Platygyra and Porites species. Plate refers to any coral that forms a plate-like shape, such as tabular Acropora species, and the soft category refers to corals lacking a hard skeleton.
What is the best way to identify corals?
The most abundant genus of branching corals is Acropora, with over 100 described species in the Indo-Pacific. If you are just learning to identify corals, Acropora is the best place to start. When reading the scientific names of corals, the name starts with a genus, then a species.