A coral walks into a (sand) bar. This may sound like a joke. But new time-lapse photography shows new details of how a squishy, loner coral polyp without legs manages to “walk.”
Instead of banding together to build coral reefs, mushroom corals typically live alone. From the outside, these corals (within the family Fungiidae) look like shaggy round mushroom caps that fell into the ocean.
While “walk” may be too two-legged a word for the gait filmed by coral biologist and microscopist Brett Lewis, the soft body will “pulse and inflate like a jellyfish,” he says. To nudge forward, the coral polyp turns inflations and pulsations into tiny hops,