A new microscope has prepared an incredible video that shows corals kissing, growing and fighting amid reefs that look more like gorgeous marine gardens drifting in a breeze. The wonder microscope has the capability to work under up to 100 feet of water, showing these mysterious creatures in a whole new light and capturing tiny objects at high resolution despite the distortion of the sea.
Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego have showed the amazing results of their latest foray into underwater microscopy—Polyps “kiss” — in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
The Benthic Underwater Microscope (BUM) can only capture high-resolution images of objects about 10 micrometers or about a tenth of the width of human hair. Contrary to lab microscopes that are great for slicing and staining samples to examine them in incredible detail, BUM allows researchers to record real-world behavior on a smaller scale. Prior to this microscope, underwater resolution has been up to about 20 to 50 micrometers.
“Normally when you study a coral reef it can be difficult to observe the corals as active animals because the individual polyps are so small and they typically move slowly”, Scripps PhD student Andrew Mullen, co-lead author of the study, said in a statement. “With the underwater microscope we can look at very small spatial scales and record activity over several hours”.