![\"Leptopsammia](\"http:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/MBI000860-600px.jpg\")
<\/a>Leptopsammia prouviti, growing on undercut limestone ledges, Lyme Bay, Southwest England.<\/p><\/div>\n
For most, the word coral conjures up images of living reefs surrounded by shoals of colourful fish, in clear, brightly lit tropical waters.\u00a0 Whilst this is the type of environment where the vast majority of coral species are found, it is not the exclusive habitat.\u00a0 That corals are found in the chilly and turbid seas around Britain would probably surprise most of theBritish public.\u00a0 In fact there are five known species of coral found in shallow waters around the UK.\u00a0 The two best known species are the Devonshire cup coral, Caryophyllia smithii, and the sunset coral, Leptopsammia pruvoti.\u00a0 Like all our shallow water corals they are solitary corals (apart from the Weymouth carpet coral, Hoplangia durotrix, which forms small clusters of polyps growing from a basal plate).\u00a0 They don’t form large, colonial skeletons and hence don’t form reefs.The Devonshire cup coral is familiar to many divers and may even be found intertidally in shady overhangs at the very bottom of the tide.<\/p>\n
Leptopsammia pruvoti is rather more enigmatic.\u00a0 It is known to occur in only a handful of locations around Southwest Britain (The Scilly Isles, Lundy Island, Plymouth Sound, Lyme Bay and Portland Bill) though it is more widely distributed along the Atlantic coast of southern Europe and in the Mediterranean.\u00a0 Leptopsammia pruvoti belongs to the taxonmic family Dendrophylliidae, a sub-group of corals.\u00a0 An interesting feature of nearly all (around 91%) Dendrophylliidae corals is that they lack symbiotic zooxanthellae (technically speaking they are azooxanthellate<\/span>).\u00a0 At this point you may be asking ‘so why is that a big deal … and what exactly are symbiotic zooxanthellae anyway?’.\u00a0 A common feature of most reef building corals (hermatypic corals) is the presence of tiny unicellular algae, termed zooxanthellae, living\u00a0 within their tissues.\u00a0 This is a symbiotic relationship; Zooxanthellae gain protection and some nuitrients from the coral whilst the coral gets glucose, glycerol and amino acids from the unicellular algae.\u00a0 One of the key benefits for the coral is that this facilitates the production of large amounts of calcium carbonate, the material from which coral skeletons are formed.\u00a0 Thus the calcuim carbonate based, skeleton-forming process in corals containing zoozanthellae is ‘turbo-charged’; they are able to produce skeletal material at a greater rate and so can grow to form large, colonial skeletons that meld together and form reefs.\u00a0 Azooxanthellate corals do not have this advantage, but their lack of dependence on photosynthesising algae frees them to expand beyond the brightly-lit surface waters. Azooxanthellate corals in the family Dendrophylliidae can be found from a few metres depth down to over two thousand metres.\u00a0 This takes them deep into the aphotic zone, the parts of the ocean completely devoid of light (roughly, below 1000 metres).\u00a0 It also allows them to colonies niches that are out of direct sunlight, such as caves (e.g. the recently discovered coral Leptoseris troglodyt<\/em>a, troglodyte= ‘cave dweller’, found around Indonesia and the Philippines) or the rock overhangs of Lyme Bay. For most, the word coral conjures up images of living reefs surrounded by shoals of colourful fish, in clear, brightly lit tropical waters. Whilst this is the type of environment where the vast majority of coral species are found, it is not the exclusive habitat. That corals are found in the chilly and turbid seas around Britain would probably surprise most of theBritish public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2442,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199,69,92],"tags":[733,735,732,734,664,736,401,666,667],"class_list":["post-2441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-devon","category-lyme-bay","category-marine-life","tag-azooxanthellate-corals","tag-cold-water-corals","tag-corals","tag-deep-water-corals","tag-leptopsammia","tag-leptopsammia-pruvoti","tag-lyme-bay-reefs","tag-sunset-coral","tag-sunset-corals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2582,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions\/2582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span>
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\nFind me on Google+ Colin Munro<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"