The polyps produce a hard outer skeleton made of calcium carbonate ... In fact, it provides shelter and food for a quarter of all marine life. It also protects millions of people living in coastal ...

During the day, most polyps stay inside their protective skeleton, but at night, they stick their tentacles out to feed on zooplankton ... Although they occupy less than 0.1% of the ocean floor, coral ...

said Mark Martindale, Ph.D., director of the University of Florida's Whitney Laboratory for Marine ... skeleton production, tweaking their way toward creating climate-resilient coral polyps ...