More Information and Facts about Corals!!

-Corals are marine organisms from the class Anthozoa and exist as small sea anemone–like polyps, typically in colonies of many identical individuals. The group includes the important reef builders that are found in tropical oceans, which secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.
-A coral "head", commonly perceived to be a single organism, is formed from thousands of individual but genetically identical polyps, each polyp only a few millimeters in diameter.
-Over thousands of generations, the polyps lay down a skeleton that is characteristic of their species. Then a head of coral grows by asexual reproduction of the individual polyps.
-Corals also breed sexually by spawning, with corals of the same species releasing gametes simultaneously over a period of one to several nights around a full moon eventhough corals can catch plankton using stinging cells on their tentacles, they obtain most of their nutrients from symbiotic unicellular algae called zooxanthellae.
-Consequently, most corals depend on sunlight and they grow in clear and shallow water, typically at depths shallower than 60 m.
adapted from ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corals)