![]() Classifying them is a gargantuan task because sponges are a vast tribe there are perhaps 10,000 species. The following year, I enrolled for a master of science degree in marine zoology, with Bergquist as my supervisor. She made them exciting-surprising as this may sound-and I was captivated. Bergquist (Dame Patricia, as she became in 1994, when she was made a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire) was a world authority on the spineless creatures. I was in Pat Bergquist’s invertebrate zoology class, at the University of Auckland, in 1975. I can’t fully recall how the affair started, it was so long ago. This algae provides nutrition to the coral polyps, helping them to grow more rapidly.Written by Kennedy Warne Photographed by Richard Robinson Many scleractinian corals have photosynthetic symbiotic algae in their tissues, called zooxanthellae. Modern corals―scleractinians―first appeared in the Triassic, and include both solitary and colonial species. Both rugose and tabulate corals went extinct at the end of the Permian. These corals receive their name from the table-like horizontal partitions within their chambers. ![]() (Solitary forms are often called "horn corals.") Tabulate corals were exclusively colonial and produced a variety of shapes, including sheetlike and chainlike forms. ![]() Rugose corals were both colonial and solitary. Solitary coral lives independently, as a single isolated polyp. ![]() Colonial corals live in colonies of hundreds or even thousands of individuals that are attached to one another. Each group of coral possesses distinctly shaped "cups" that hold individual animals, or polyps. ![]() They possess stinging tentacles, which they use to feed on small planktonic prey. Corals are sessile relatives of jellyfish and sea anemones. ![]()
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