Shayle Matsuda

That's a great question that we think about all the time, actually.

So corals are animals, first and foremost.

But the corals, when you think of a coral reef corals, they're much more than the sum of their parts.

So the coral animal.

looks white they have clear tissues and they secrete a white calcium carbonate skeleton but the reason that when you're snorkeling around a coral reef they don't appear white to us is because they have symbiotic algae which live inside their tissues that provide up to like 95% of their daily nutritional needs and the algae's color themselves are what we're looking at when we see corals

And just like you and me, corals also have a microbiome.

They have bacteria that live inside of their tissues that also play a lot of really important roles.

OK.

This is like the hardest question.

I know.

It's like, oh man, we have a term for this.

It's called the coral holobiont.

And that is like the coral animal itself.

It's symbiotic algae.

It's bacteria.

They're fungi.

They're archaea.

There are a lot of different obligate symbionts that these corals have that are critical for their life and function.

And the transparent skin is the animal itself.

So just like trees that grow in the forest, if you count their rings, you get an idea of how old they are.