NOCTURNAL worms with powerful home-making instincts may have laid the
foundations of some of the world’s great coral reefs, researchers in Australia
believe.
For reefs to grow, early settlers need a firm footing—newly formed
volcanic rock, for instance. Yet massive reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef
have grown up on shifting sediments with no obvious solid foundation. John
Chisholm, of the European Oceanological Observatory in Monaco and Russell Kelley
of Watermark Films in Townsville, Australia, suggest that common marine worms
called eunicids could have seeded the growth of such reefs.
Chisholm and Kelley kept a tropical marine aquarium…
