Shayle Matsuda

Sometimes when they do grow up next to each other, you can see kind of like a scar between colonies where one individual ends and the next one begins.

But we're also seeing evidence of fusion.

DAN GALPIN- So much.

MELANIE WARRICK- Yeah?

Oh, that's cool.

DAN GALPIN- I mean, it's a really exciting time to be a biologist right now, and asking questions that we couldn't afford to ask before, didn't have the technology to ask before, on these really large scales.

So corals don't have a lot of predators.

There's a lot of fish that will, like you've probably heard of parrotfish, that will try to eat the macroalgae around coral.

Sometimes they will nibble the coral, too.

But for the most part, there's not a lot of animals coming towards them to eat them in that sense.

They use their stinging cells a lot in prey capture.

So if you see, if you stare at a coral long enough under the scope, and if a piece of plankton swims up, you'll see it almost like a Venus slide trap.

You'll see the plankton get stuck to the coral tentacles, and then the coral tentacles will pull it into its mouth and suck it in and digest it.

It's really neat to watch.

But the stinging cells, if you touch a coral, which you shouldn't do, it will try to sting you too, but our skin is too thick.

But other animals like Portuguese man-of-war, for example, there are stinging cells that can affect us too, but corals are pretty safe.

Don't touch them, but...

And what this will do is I can go out there and take a really small tissue sample, extract the DNA, sequence the DNA, get back like, you know, 10, 20,000 reads of all these different organisms that we were able to amplify.

And from that, I can see, you know, who is there.

get an idea of what are the functions of these organisms and how important might that be to the health and survival of the coral.