soft corals

Unlike their hard coral cousins, soft corals have no stony outer skeletons to leave behind when they die.

Soft corals open up to the current to feed on plankton and give the reef some of its most colorful scenes.

Soft corals do not form reefs, but may be present in a coral reef ecosystem.

For soft corals, which are much more sensitive, bleaching usually wipes them out for good.

Some new compounds have been isolated from Chinese soft corals , gorgonians and stone corals .

It boasts plenty of brightly coloured sea fans, soft corals and barrel sponges.

Unlike hard corals, soft corals don't leave a limestone skeleton behind and cannot regenerate.

Soft corals are common throughout the Indo-Pacific Ocean, where Benayahu focuses his research.

This means that soft corals simply vanish in response to environmental stresses.

But efforts to catalogue the world's soft corals are still underway, and many species remain unknown to scientists.

Vivid orange, pink, and white soft corals branch out from a reef in Papua New Guinea.

"Once soft corals disappear, the entire ecosystem is threatened, " Benayahu said.

Patterns in Nature: Coral A palette of soft corals grows along a reef near Fiji.

The causes of coral bleaching are roughly the same for hard and soft corals.

There is such a huge gap in our knowledge of soft corals .

Soft corals don't leave behind a hard skeleton when they die, as reefmaking hard corals do.

Indo-Pacific coral reefs contain some 90 genera of soft corals.

Both hard and soft corals have a symbiotic relationship with zooxanthellae algae, which live in coral and give it its color.

Soft corals with soft texture will sway by water wave, so that they can make our reef aquarium look more graceful and exuberant.

Vibrant anemones and soft corals are part of the ecosystem in Svalbard, Norway's Arctic archipelago