Micro‐CT reconstruction reveals the colony pattern regulations of four dominant reef‐building corals

Abstract Colonies are the basic geometric building blocks of coral reefs. However, the forming regulations of both colonies and reefs are still not understood adequately. Therefore, in this study, we reconstructed 25 samples using high‐resolution micro‐computed tomography to investigate coral growth patterns and parameters. Our skeleton and canal reconstructions revealed the characteristics of different coral species, and we further visualized the growth axes and growth rings to understand the coral growth directions. We drew a skeleton grayscale map and calculated the coral skeleton void ratios to ascertain the skeletal diversity, devising a method to quantify coral growth. On the basis of the three‐dimensional (3D) reconstructions and growth parameters, we investigated the growth strategies of different coral species. This research increases the breadth of knowledge on how reef‐building corals grow their colonies, providing information on reef‐forming regulations. The data in this paper contain a large amount of coral growth information, which can be used in further research on reef‐forming patterns under different conditions. The method used in this study can also be applied to animals with porous skeletons.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Ecology and Evolution

• Publication date

  2021-11-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/ece3.8308PMID 34824826PMCID 8601894
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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