Corals Stir Up the Water: Tiny Animals Engineer Their Environment for Nutrients (VIDEO)

Corals may just be more active than scientists once thoughts. Researchers have found that these tiny animals actually engineer their environment in order to sweep water into turbulent patterns that greatly enhance their ability to exchange nutrients and dissolved gases with their environment.

In order to learn a bit more about how corals interact with their environment, the scientists placed living coral in tanks. Then, they zoomed in on the coral surface with powerful microscopes and high-speed video cameras in order to get a better look at what the coral was actually doing. They found that, surprisingly, quite a bit of action was occurring with the living coral.

"These microenvironmental processes are not only important, but also unexpected," said Roman Stocker, senior author of the paper describing the findings, in a news release.

Corals have cilia, which are small threadlike appendages that can push water along the coral surface. Previously, scientists believed that the water currents created by these cilia moved parallel to the coral surface in a conveyor-belt fashion. Yet this latest study reveals that the cilia are arranged in a way that causes swirls of water that draw nutrients toward the coral, while driving away potentially toxic waste products, such as excess oxygen.

"The general thinking has been that corals are completely dependent upon ambient flow, from tides and turbulence, to enable them to overcome diffusion limitation and facilitate the efficient supply of nutrients and the disposal of dissolved waste products," said Orr Shapiro, co-first author of the paper.

It turns out, though, that this isn't the case. Instead, corals take an active role in drawing nutrients toward them. The findings could help scientists better predict coral health in the face of climate change, and could also have implications in other fields. Since cilia are ubiquitous in more complex organisms, this study could mean that researchers may learn a bit more about cilia in those organisms.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.