2007-09-06, Coral Reef Erotica 神奇的珊瑚礁

（单词翻译）

You may think you are gazing upon a sleepy coral reef in the Caribbean Sea, and of course you are. But hiding in plain sight, is a riving teeming¹ hotbed of erotica , that makes a Hollywood hot up party seem like a trip to the dentist.

This is a coral reef regenerating² itself. Now here's a brain coral . What looks like planets drifting through space are tiny bundles of brain coral eggs and sperm³ filling the sea. OK, maybe the word erotica doesn't quite apply, but still, this is Mother Nature at her most voluptuous⁴ , saying yes to the universe.

Some corals are hermaphroditic , releasing packages that contain both eggs and sperm. Somehow it works out so that dozens of different species release eggs and sperm at just the right time on particular days of the year. But how does a tube spun⁵ sperm know not to mate with a coral egg? I mean who's directing traffic down here? Somehow, Nature works it out.

In this primordial⁶ soup of life stuff, eggs and sperm of each species flow towards the surface and find each other. It's in that magic moment of fertilization that larvae⁷ are created. Some of the larvae free-float as far as 100 miles, and then settle at the bottom, where they find a patch of seafloor they call a home. Here they morph into their adult form called a polyp . Hundreds of generations of polyps each build tiny cup-shaped homes by secreting⁸ a hard skeleton of limestone⁹. After the polyps die, others land on top, and form new skeletons. Slowly, gradually, a huge coral reef is built beneath them. The abandoned homes, billions upon billions of them, are what form these huge coral reefs. They are by far the largest structures built by living creatures in the world.

These coral reefs take millions of years to build. Careless divers¹⁰, boulders¹¹, and global warming can destroy huge parts of them in little time. Scientists predict that more than half of the world’s reefs may be gone by 2030. That’s not just a problem for the coral themselves. Over a quarter of all sea creatures call the reefs home.