A team of international scientists has produced the first 3D printed synthetic coral tissues that can house living symbiotic algae. The team at the University of California built three different 3D-bioprinted corals, each mimicking either the skeleton, gut, or skin…
Coral “toolkit” discovered, tells corals when to “build” skeletons
When coral release larvae, they don’t yet have that reef-building skeletal structure and at some point, they know when its time to settle down and start building. Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Monoa, Rutgers University and the University of Haifa have just…
A visit to the Smithsonian Institution’s vast coral collection
Aquarists spend the majority of their coral-keeping career looking at, staring at, and growing live corals, hopefully. This is the inverse case for coral taxonomists such as Dr. Stephen Cairns who studies the remains of corals as skeletons, and all…
Porous coral skeletons are great surrogates for bone grafts
The Israeli desert is not exactly where you’d expect to find a coral farm, so far from the Red Sea, but in the Negev desert is precisely where OkCoral has set up their coral farming operation. Unlike the typical coral…
Leptoseris skeletons specialized to double-dip into into available light
The amazing stony coral genus Leptoseris is far from staying out of the spotlight since researchers have just teased out one of its mesophotic tricks. Fort eh longest time scientists including Rich Pyle have worked on projects to investigate how Leptoseris could grow so…
