Coral organisms use minuscule appendages to control their environment, stirring up water eddies to bring nutrients

Conventional wisdom has long held that corals—whose calcium-carbonate skeletons form the foundation of coral reefs—are passive organisms that rely entirely on ocean currents to deliver dissolved substances, such as nutrients and oxygen. But now scientists at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) in Israel have found that they are far from passive, engineering their environment to sweep water into turbulent patterns that greatly enhance their ability to exchange nutrients and dissolved gases with their environment.

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