We are graced today with a second exceptional marine aquarium video, this time featuring a Ricordea chomping on some pelleted coral food. We’ve all seen videos of LPS corals mowing down pelleted food, Scolies are exceptionally fun to do this with since they have such prodigious feeder tentacles.
But this is no ordinary Yuma, the Ricordea cast by Reef Wholesale to star in this gluttonous time lapse is a banging neon orange specimen with highlighter green interior and most notably, a bright green lippy mouth. When viewed at 20x normal speed this time lapse video appears to impart on this single corallimorph polyp a sense of purpose and awareness about getting the food in the gullet.
We don’t know about you, but we tend to think of our corals as very passive creatures, even while they are trying to nuke neighbors with varying degrees of chemical warfare and acontia filaments. There’s nothing passive about the way this yuma polyp deliberately activates its entire body to eat a yummy pellet fo Fauna Marin coral food and we must remind ourselves that there’s at least a handful of neurons firing in that Cnidarian animal.
