Shayle Matsuda

And one of them would be bleached, and one of them would be visibly totally normal.

And so we're really trying to understand what is it about that coral's genetic makeup or symbiont communities that is allowing these corals to perform a lot better.

Yeah, that's a good question.

So a coral colony is a coral.

You can think of a coral itself as a coral polyp.

So you look a little mouth, kind of like if you took an anemone, that kind of structure, mouth in the middle, tentacles on the outside.

And as a coral grows, it buds off and creates a genetically identical polyp.

And as those polyps continue to multiply and spread and grow, you've got a coral colony that is made up of polyps that are all one genetic individual.

Yeah, that's a hard question.

I understand that a coral's not a person, too, but do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

And that's a hard question, and actually people in the lab are looking at that, too.

Like, at what life stage are corals able to fuse together and share resources or not?

Do some species do this more than others?

So that's definitely a really good question.

Okay, good.

But we don't totally know the answers to that.

You can't just look at one and be like, that's...

three or four genetically distinct individuals.

It's like we're literally the same person.