coral eats?

This image about is of coral eating jelly fish. Not all coral can do that, especially not the hard corals, its normally just the soft corals.



When you think of Coral you dont normally think that its and animal, I knew when I fist learned about coral I thought it was a cool kind of rock. Then when you find out its an animal, that a lot of times has a very hard skeleton on the outside of it, you probably wouldn't think that it eats any food. But if you really think about it, its a living organism, and all living organisms need to get nutrition from somewhere. Many corals are passive feeders on plankton. Most corals also get nutrition from microscopic algae (zooxanthellae) living within their tissue. It lives in their tissue to give it nutrition and energy to build their skeleton. Coral polyps are generally nocturnal feeders and are provided sugars made by their photosynthetic zooxanthellae during the day.They must therefore live in shallow clear water to allow sunlight to reach the algae. What do coral, and plants that don't live in the water have in common? What do you think happens to coral that doesnt get a lot of sunlight?