LIVE CORAL REEF CAM
- Local tme
- Location: Long Island Aquarium, New York, United States
- Source: Hamptons. com
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Info: Live streaming coral reef webcam at Long Island Aquarium in New York.
This colourful reef exhibit has marine life including tangs, wrasses, gobies, angelfish and sea urchins.
This live aquarium cam is courtesy of Hamptons
More info: The live Coral Reef exhibit at Long Island Aquarium, incorporates both stony and soft corals, as well as anemones and coralline algae.
Stony corals (or scleractinians) are marine animals which secrete a skeleton of calcium carbonate. An individual animal, called a polyp, has a cylindrical shaped body and an oral disc at the top which has a mouth with tentacles.
Stony corals are found in all of the world’s oceans. They lay down the foundations of coral reefs and build up the structure of the reef. Their main food source comes from photosynthetic algae which live inside the polyp but they also use their mouth tentacles to catch plankton and tiny fish.
Soft corals do not have an exoskeleton but are soft, sway in the ocean currents and often resemble plants. Soft corals have tentacles which provide defense, capture food and clean debris. By providing habitat for fish, snails, algae, and a diversity of other marine species, they are integral members of the reef ecosystem.