Corals are foundational for ocean life. Known as the rainforests of the sea, they create habitats for 25% of all marine organisms, despite only covering less than 1% of the ocean's area./ppCoral patches the width and height of basketball arenas used to be common throughout the world's oceans. But due to numerous human-generated stresses and coral disease, which is known to be associated with ocean sediments, most of the world's coral is gone./pp"It's like if all the pine trees in Georgia disappeared over a period of 30 to 40 years," saida href="https://biosciences.gatech.edu/people/mark-hay"Mark Hay/a, Regents' Chair and the Harry and Anna Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology in thea href="https://biosciences.gatech.edu/"School of Biological Sciences/aat the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Just imagine how that affects biodiversity and ecosystems of the ocean."/ppIn first-of-its-kind research, Hay, along with research scientista href="http://www.cody-clements.com/"Cody Clements/a, discovered a crucial missing element that plays a profound role in keeping coral healthy - an animal of overlooked importance known as a sea cucumber./ph3a href="https://research.gatech.edu/feature/sea-cucumber"Read about how they figured it out at Georgia Tech Research News/a./h3/div
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div div pSummary sentence/p /div divIn a first-of-its-kind study, the researchers discovered that sea cucumbers protect coral from disease./div /div
div div pSummary/p /div divpIn a first-of-its-kind study,researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that sea cucumbers-sediment-eating organisms that function like autonomous vacuum cleaners of the ocean floor- play an enormous role in protecting coral from disease./p/div /div
div div pDateline/p /div divtime datetime="2024-02-27T12:00:00Z"Tue, 02/27/2024 - 12:00/time /div /div div h2Email/h2 /div div class="content-column-inner" [email protected] /div div h2Contact/h2 /div div class="content-column-inner" pCatherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor/ppa href="https://news.gatech.edu
