A RATHER LARGE number of people thought that corals were rocks. And certainly, in Ruth Gates's almost-bare office at the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology, where Kaneohe Bay filled the window, the only object on her desk was a lovely ivory-pinkish stone coral, branched like a tree. But it would have been much more beautiful alive, a colony of tiny polyps bustling and busy as a three-dimensional city. It would have been much more stunning when the algae lodged in every cell of every polyp were feeding them sugars built from sunlight and colouring them so crazily that she could only gasp "Wow!", and laugh, when she swam past them. But then she also said "Wow! That's gorgeous!" when she saw, under the laser scanning confocal microscope, just one daring individual flex its muscular mouth or shoot out its sting-tipped tentacles to catch food from the water. Her single-minded mission was to keep these beauties going.
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