惊人的石质珊瑚属瘦肉is far from staying out of the spotlight since researchers have just teased out one of its mesophotic tricks. Fort eh longest time scientists including Rich Pyle have worked on projects to investigatehow瘦肉could grow so wellbeyond 250 feet, and earlier this year some Aussies found the genus livingphotosyntheticallydeeper than 400 feet.
While examining deep living瘦肉殖民地并将它们与浅水进行比较Poritesspecies, Samuel Khang and collaborators noticed a few distinct things about the ‘Leptos’. First of all, they absorbed more light than shallow Porites, and in addition to being chromatically adapted to the spectrum at depths beyond 100 feet, strangely the瘦肉有一个lowerdensity of zooxanthellae. But how could the corals absorb更多的带有光较少的pigment?
经过进一步调查，发现骨骼的骨骼“L. hawaiiensis,L. scabraand other unidentified瘦肉spp” have a very regular construction, especially compared to the highly irregular pattern exhibited byPorites.Using fiber optic measurements of reflectance by coral skeletons, the study determined that瘦肉reflect 300 to 400% less light than Porites. The researchers concluded the following:
“[Leptoseris] coral skeletons may have superior light-trapping properties by virtue of their micro-scale geometry. For deep-water zooxanthellate corals like Leptoseris, this skeletal design likely increases the average path length of light within their tissue to be much greater than that of their shallow-water counterparts thereby enabling superior light harvesting with less pigment per unit area.”
这项研究中研究的瘦体物种具有相当薄的骨骼，但并不难相信其他物种的设计leptoseris mycetoseroidesabove and others also have skeletal geometries to capture light. We’ve always loved the瘦肉对于它们的怪异骨骼形状，但是现在有一个复杂的骨骼图案的理由，我们更加爱它们。
