Question: how do you think the coral manages to live on the sea floor?

Sean Clement answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Ooh, excellent question coconut!

Short answer: Sunlight

Now for the long one. Corals live thanks to a special relationship that they share with a very, very tiny type of creature called Zooxanthellae (pronounced zoo-zan-thell-ee) This zooxanthellae lives within the skin of individual corals polyps and does 2 things. One: It gives corals their amazing colours. All the different colours you see are provided by different types of zooxanthellae. Without them, corals would be toally seethrough and would appear to be white because that’s the colour of the skeleton underneath.

The second thing is more important though. As I said before, the coral and the zooxanthellae have a special type of relationship called symbiosis. What that means is that the coral and the zooxanthellae both get something out of living together. Zooxanthellae, being very small, would be at risk of being eaten by anything bigger than them (which is almost everything) if they just lived in the water so living inside the coral keeps them safe from things that don’t eat coral (of which there aren’t very many) The coral, on the other hand gets all the food it could possibly ever need from the zooxanthellae.

Why? Photosynthesis! Zooxanthellae, like plants, use photosythesis to produce their own food but as we said, they’re very small so they don’t need a lot and what they don’t eat (about 98% of what they produce they ‘give’ to the coral which is very happy about this and proceeds to polish it all off and carry on growing.

That answer your question ok?