I loved the delicate yet bold characteristic of this little sprig of coral. It's a bleak day outside and the monochrome of the shoreline was punctuated with this neon form of life. It would have been easy to miss.
Here's what it inspired me to learn about it:
It is an animal colony, not a plant. What you see is a limestone condominium of dozens of small cylinder-shaped animal polyps.
It is called a sea whip (also called gorgonian or soft coral).
The colors (yellow, magenta, turquoise, pink, white, orange) are determined by the type of algaes that live in the polyp tissues. These algaes use the CO2 expelled by the coral polyps, and produce the oxygen that the polyp needs in such close quarters.
4 comments:
Argh! I am so intimidated by your artistic eye! But perhaps I'll learn by observing your blog. :)
You can link to julieunplugged365.blogspot.com.
I discovered I can upload the photo and the text to go with it directly from flickr. It's way cool. So that's where I'll post. Add me to la liste. :)
I'm going to use your list as my list. Hope you don't mind.
Fun project! Reminds me of NaNoWriMo which is why I jumped on the bandwagon. I don't want to miss out.
Julie
That is really neat! When I first looked at it, I thought I saw a tangle of wires and laths from an old torn down plaster wall...
I keep looking and saw the sand and shell, then the coral just popped out! What a beautiful color in the middle of all the browns.
Beautiful. Reminds my of my childhood at the beach.
Love this shot. I have a lot to learn. I am realizing already that I "see" differenty when I want to take pictures.
Ummm... maybe I'll email you about how to add the links to other 365 participants. Can't seem to figure that out.
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