Shayle Matsuda

Corals actually work the same way, where they are constantly secreting this calcium carbonate skeleton and growing.

And researchers will actually take a core of that skeleton, and you can actually count the different layers and get an idea of the age of the corals and also what was going on on the planet at the time.

It's kind of like seasons in the ocean.

Different corals will grow at different rates, so kind of like different plants as well.

In a nutshell, as a coral begins to grow and keeps putting down these layers of calcium carbonate, we can use things like carbon dating to get an idea of what was happening in the atmosphere and in the oceans at those times.

And so it gives us a geologic history of what was happening in these environments.

Well, yeah, I know.

When we say coral reef corals, they're a particular type of group of corals that live in the shallow waters, that have these algal symbionts that rely on photosynthesis to get their food.

But corals are a really large group of organisms.

And we have deep sea corals that don't have these symbiotes that just feed heterotrophically by eating plankton or things in the water.

And a lot of corals can have pigments and their skeletons do have pigments.

of pigments of their own.

And so black corals, red corals, those things that you see in the stores, that's still the skeleton, but those are the organisms themselves, which we shouldn't pull out of the ocean.

Yeah, very often.

There's a lot of protections in different places about corals, but it's not everywhere.

Yeah.

But what you can have is that with technology increases, we're doing a lot of work with 3D imaging.

And you can go home or go to a museum or a tech place and get a coral printed and put that in your house.

Yeah, absolutely.

And just as beautiful.