After just a few years, a single piece of coral can harbor as many as 25,000 polyps, all children of the original founder. These creatures live fast, but not all die young. 

 

Wachenfeld: “Many corals that help to build the reef only live for a few years, but some, as individual animals, will live for 1000 years or more. These animals are as ancient as any plant or animal on our planet. They are quite incredible.”

 

Here the polyps have gone into overdrive. They’ve built a reef over 1,200 miles long, enough to stretch from Seattle to Los Angeles. Because in this one spot, a unique combination of circumstances have come together to create a coral heaven. 

 

The whole reef sits on the barely submerged edge of the Australian coast, known as the continental shelf. Other continents have shelves, but none like this. It’s huge, in some places, up to 100 miles wide. On this shelf, it’s summer all year round. Most of all, it’s shallow, so this whole stretch of seabed is blasted in sunlight. 

 

To polyps, light matters as much as warmth, because living within its tissues is a plant.