Hey guys, how are *realizing you can't answer* you doing? I don't know why my intros and my outros are always so awkward
I just never know what to say, or I say too much, or I say too little, I jus- I never can seem to get it right
right, but maybe that's just my thing. Maybe my thing is that I'm a mess
sounds about right. So today's video we are going to be talking about coral.
I'm gonna be telling you everything I can possibly tell you about corals in ten minutes. So we're gonna see...
how I do... I crack a lot of jokes in my videos normally because I think educational ones can get kind of boring but
this is an educational one. So welcome students. Ghost, what are you doing? Teach them a coral fact real quick, Ghost... *Ghost is silent*
Okay, so yes, let's
let's begin talking about corals.
So first off we're gonna start with the difference between corals and plants
a lot of people think that corals are plants, but they are not plants. They're not related to plants,
they have nothing to do with plants.
So we're gonna start first by making a little chart about the differences between corals and plants
First off, corals. Are. Not. Plants. That's how they're different. They're not the same thing. How... Is that?
I'm a bad teacher this sucks. Corals are animals
they are sessile animals
which means they don't move they sit wherever they are in life and they live their whole life and in that little spot unless for
some reason they become detached from their rock and they blow away
and they blow away but they don't have any choice in where they land and they don't have any choice in how to move they cannot
control their movements. They cannot go walk around they don't have feet. They don't have legs
They are just sessile animals. Plants are plants, they're not animals.
So that's their differences plants can make their own food using photosynthesis. Basically plants sit outside
They absorb the sunlight and then they convert it into food. Corals can't do this,
they actually have to eat. Corals actually have little tentacles. They are nocturnal hunters; they wait until the Sun goes down when there's
no sunlight they put their little tentacles out and they catch different kinds of plankton and that is what they eat
so corals do eat food. They need calcium and nutrients in their life,
they can't just rely on the Sun for food.
When you look at a coral you just see these little moving balls of color
these are actually called polyps and every single one is an individual coral.
So when you are looking at what you call a coral you are actually looking at
thousands of little corals all together in a community. All of these individual corals are called polyps and
they start out as one and then they are asexual they reproduce on their own and they create a whole little community of...
corals. And that's what we know, for example, as a green star polyp when green star polyps are closed
you can definitely see each individual stem a little easier, and when they're open and flowing all around they look like one big little...
One big little ??? They look like one big field of grass, kind of, but they are not grass.
They are an animal. Corals do have different temperaments;
some are more calm while others are more aggressive. An example of an aggressive coral is a galaxea.
Galaxeas have big sweeping tentacles that come out at night and they will sting other corals. They will sting anything.
So this is important to know when keeping a galaxea because then you want to keep it in your tank away from your other
corals, so then all your corals are safe.
It can grow it can reach out for food without harming other corals, things like that. Corals take part in a symbiotic relationship.
There is a type of algae called zooanthellae, and it lives inside of corals. Corals
Give the zooanthellae a home and in return the zooanthellae eat the waste from the coral, keep things clean, and basically keep them
alive. Zooanthellae also gives coral their color.
so when a coral is not doing too well if they get too warm, for example,
they will release the zooanthellae and that's when they turn into this white color.
This is known as coral bleaching and that is how it happens
and you can tell that a coral is unhealthy when it is all white because that means it's
healthy enough to even be homing the zooanthellae.
And that means there's something that needs to be fixed when coral bleaching takes place. It is not irreversible.
All that means is that with the proper care,
they can get healthier.
But, if you don't pay attention and you let them stay white or bleached
they will eventually die because the zooanthellae are an important,
crucial part of a corals life and if it can't house the zooanthellae, eventually the waste is gonna build up in the coral,
it's not gonna hunt for food as often, because it can't maintain the waste
because the zooanthellae is not there to help and the corals will end up starving and dying. Corals
do actually a skeleton - it is where all the polyps lay on it, but it is not a skeleton like ours.
They're not real actual bones.
And if a coral dies,
they leave a skeleton behind and
another coral can come land on that skeleton and build a home on it if they wanted to. The live rock that we bring home
sometimes is part of a giant coral skeleton. Sometimes on live rock you can see what it was.
You can kind of make out what kind of coral it was and other times you can't really tell but, it is really interesting seeing
corals grow on rocks and create a home or a skeleton out of them now going back between plants and corals.
There is another third creature that we can compare corals to and that's anemones. Anemones are closely related to corals
but they are not the same. Corals are sessile.
While anemones can actually move; they have a foot they can go and choose where they want to stay and if they aren't happy
with that, they can let go and go find a new spot,
re-home, and they have a mouth right in the center.
They are one single invertebrate closely related to jellyfish while corals are the accumulation of thousands of little animals
so although corals do not need Sun for food
they do need Sun for the zooanthellae algae to grow. The zooanthellae algae is a plant and it relies on
photosynthesis for food
so if corals don't have the proper amount of sunlight every day
The algae will die off and that leads to the corals dying
now there's a lot of different kinds of corals, but there's three main groups
LPS, SPS and soft corals. LPS stands for large polyp "pull up"
LPS stands for large polyp stony,
SPS stands for small polyp stony, and soft coral is a word - it doesn't stand for anything.
SPS corals are definitely the hardest to take care of; they require extremely clean water,
Perfect amount of sunlight, perfect amount of flow, and in general they are more fragile. SPS corals are long small... "long small."
Hmm. Let's try that again
SPS corals are the branching coral. They are long skeletons with thousands of little tiny polyps covering the skeleton
but you can still normally clearly make out the skeleton and it's form and shape. while LPS corals are lots of
polyps all together they make up kind of like a head and then the head sits off of the little rocker
skeleton that they are growing on. Now in this video
I am featuring a lot of corals that I got from worldwide corals. Worldwide corals is an awesome,
awesome, AWESOME
company and they even have a
subscription program where basically you pay a fee and every single month you get a package of corals and supplies for the coral.
They're super cool, and they actually did send me a bird's nest. So here's the bird's nest that they sent me.
It's a beautiful, They are really-- SPS corals are awesome
but they're definitely
harder to take care of and it's even harder sometimes if you decide to mix them in your aquarium
the reason for this is because the water differences LPS doesn't need as much care as
SPS corals need water-wise most people don't want to try to worry about the LPS needs and the SPS needs.
Also LPS corals have those big sweeping tentacles that can actually hurt SPS corals. So unless you really know what you're doing
I don't recommend mixing them not until you've at least got a good taste of corals. A lot of practice then, I'll say [try it].
now soft corals are definitely the easiest
ones to take care of the reason these are easy is its because they are the most tolerant to all kinds of water conditions,
they can really tolerate nitrates and nitrites better
than
LPS and SPS can, but I'm not going to say that you can go overboard and have insanely high
nitrates, ammonia, and nitrite. A lot of them can handle
extremely low light and low flow, and that's another reason why they are great for beginners is you don't have to have that
expensive aquarium lighting. You can easily get a light for less than a hundred dollars that will
provide for soft corals very well. Now I'm gonna take a break real quick "will will quick".
Okay... Got a little baby voice for a second
I'm gonna take a little break real quick from this little sit down and talk right to you for back, to back, to back, fact,
after fact, after fact, and we're going to cut to some footage of me getting some coral frags from worldwide corals. Coral fragging is basically
cutting a small piece of coral off an existing coral putting it on a small "frag" or a little rock, and
It grows into a whole new coral! And that's one way you can "breed" corals yourself.
I'm gonna show you some coral frags that I got little baby corals and I'm gonna show you them in my tank
so we're gonna go cut to that real quick...
alright so what I've done here is I've gotten some water from my fish tank which is right here. *gestures to bowl of water* and then we have a bucket
right here where all the corals are going to go into, and
we're going to,
slowly we're gonna acclimate them. Basically. Hold on. Let's get this right now. They're in this water right here
And this water might be extremely different from the water that I have here. *gestures to bowl of fishtank water*
So if you throw your corals right into the new water
they may go into shock. If there's any salinity differences in the nitrates, nitrites,
the phosphates, anything, if they are suddenly thrown into new water, they could go into shock and then they- and then they may not survive
*relaxing music plays*
Now each coral reef that there is out there
provides more home to more species of animals than any other part of the ocean
that exists. And they are one of the largest ecosystems in all of the world, and the thing that's really
fascinating about that is coral reef "cor-al, cor-ror". I cannot say it one thing that's really fascinating about that
is that coral reefs only take up less than 2% of our ocean, and yet they are more vast, and contain more life than
any other part of the ocean that we've discovered so far. So clearly if corals die
So many fish and so many aquatic species will die. Sea turtles for example eat coral.
So if there's no corals, there's no sea turtles. Other animals eat sea turtles. They would die if the sea turtles die
so many types of fish: crabs, shrimp, so much would be at stake
if our corals died corals actually are a huge part in medicine as well. They are a big part of painkillers
so they help us- so they help us stay out of pain in so many situations. And coral reefs are one of the hugest
attractions in the world. It's such a huge tourism thing that if it was gone so much money would be lost. Now
there's a million more reasons why corals are so important,
I'm just listing some of them, because like I said, I'm trying to keep this video around 10 minutes long.
I think I'm already over that, but we'll see how far I am into this
um... coral reefs actually do protect the wetlands, too
so not only is sea life in danger
But also, all of the wetlands are too. The main reasons that corals are dying is from over fishing, and from global warming. Yes,
it's real global warming is a thing
the planet is heating up
faster than everything else can learn to compensate for the extra heat, and corals can't handle the extra heat well
So, so many coral reefs around the world are bleaching
incredibly bad
and if things are turned around it will lead to all of them being wiped out. The main ways to prevent this from happening is
focusing on your carbon footprint and also watch where you get your fish because another reason like I said,
That corals are dying is from overfishing. And I'm not saying you have to stop eating fish
I'm not gonna go on a rant telling you to be vegan. That's your choice.
But, just watch where you get your fish and watch where you get your seafood instead of going to
stores like Target,
and Walmart, and getting your fish there, go to local farmers markets and that will help so much
if everyone just did that. And that was the video so I don't know how close I got 10 minutes
I don't know if I failed epically or if I actually kind of got near the goal...
we'll see when I'm editing it that was the video and I hope you guys enjoyed learning about
corals and I will see you guys next week when I talk about...
other animal stuff. Because that's what I do...
animals stuff. I love you guys so much. Thank you for 1.3 million subscribers
I don't know if I thank you guys for that last time, but this time I'm doing it. Thank you guys so much again.
I love you guys, and have a good
week!
Or a few days. I don't know until I'll see you again, but it might might be a week, might be a few days,
I don't know when my next video is coming up. But thank you guys. I love you!