If any animal is more worthy of closer scrutiny using macro video, time lapse, and fluorescence exposure, than corals, we don’t know what that creature is. Long time readers of Reef Builders will be familiar with the semi-regular sharing of videos of these sorts about corals, and very recently a trio of videos from different sources have taken a close up and intimate look at a variety of different corals using one or more of these tools.
Reefers know a little bit about coral behavior through watching them day in and day out, but nothing reveals the lively nature of soft and stony corals like time lapse videos of their moving tissues. As many times as we have watched various LPS and SPS corals munching on some food they have been offered or have captured themselves, we never tire of watching the magical dance these particles make on their way to the mouths of corals, and the subtle movements of the polyp that guide them there.
Many reefers can now dial in coral fluorescence using one of several channels of blue and near-UV LED lighting, and we are getting more and more comfortable displaying our corals this way for much of the aquarium photoperiod. Still, unless you are using specific excitation filters on the light shone and barrier filters on your eyes you won’t really see all of the fluorescence but videos can.
If you spend enough time looking at and watching corals with magnification, you will invariably see all manner of microscopic creatures crawling over corals, many of them so translucent that the shadows they cast on corals are more visible than they are. This latest video from Coral Morphologic shows an unidentified species of flatworm making a ghostly appearance over the primary polyp of a Mycedium coral.
