Builders in the Sea

A coral is a soft little sea animal that looks like a bit of jelly. It is no bigger than the end of your little finger. At one end it has a mouth surrounded by little arms called “tentacles.” The tentacles gather food. When they touch a tiny plant or animal floating nearby, they pull these inside the mouth.

The baby coral swims through the water until it finds a place to build its house, and then it never swims again. Using special glue from inside its body, it sticks itself to a rock or to another piece of coral. Once it is stuck, it starts to build itself a house with a juice from its body that turns into a kind of stone. The hard little shell houses are called coral too.

In the ocean where the water is warm, the coral grows in lovely ocean gardens. It grows in just about every color and shape you can think of. It may grow to look like lace, a fan, a leaf, a brain, the horns of a deer, or a ribbon.

One day a bud grows on the coral. This bud grows into a new coral animal. After many years there are so many coral houses built on top of one another and next to each other that they become a great wall called a “reef.”

Sometimes coral may grow together to form a reef a hundred miles long. The largest coral reef in the world is the Great Barrier Reef near Australia. It is more than 1,250 miles long. []

Aceh, Indonesia

12th April 2016

TM. Noumi