Shayle Matsuda

So that's great.

Yeah.

We're always excited, you know.

Yeah, so very often, I feel like with everything I'm saying and every choral thing, you're like, except then this other thing does something totally different that we didn't expect.

So yes, in general, a lot of the color we're seeing are the symbionts.

However, corals also do produce their own colorful pigments.

You can take a black light and shine a black light on corals, and oftentimes you'll see fluorescence.

If you've seen Chasing Coral, the movie, you'll see actually during some of the bleaching events, as the corals are bleaching, they actually will start to glow in these blues and purple colors.

And there's been a lot of hypotheses on why they're doing that.

It could potentially attract new symbionts.

It could be sort of like their own kind of like sunscreening method to protect their own tissues.

So we're still learning more about that.

But the corals are able, some species are able to also produce their own pigments themselves.

I was actually really impressed with the coral in Finding Nemo.

Really?

Yeah, they did a really good job.

There's some other inaccuracies in their biology, but I remember when I first saw it, because it came out right when I was graduating college, I was really like, they did a really nice job with the form.

So I was like, that's pretty awesome.

Corals don't tend to get a lot of spotlight in a lot of mainstream films.

I'm going to go on IMDb and find out who the coral consultant was.