Corals may lack taste buds, nostrils and a brain, but the tiny reef-builders aren’t totally senseless: Their chemoreceptor cells can detect gaseous molecules floating around in the water, many of which are created by corals themselves during photosynthesis. “It’s the way that these invertebrates ‘taste’ and ‘smell,’” says Linda Wegley Kelly, a marine microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And it’s very profound.”
Researchers have long suspected that these molecules are essential for the growth of various microbes, plants and animals that inhabit coral reefs. But the chemical compositions of the dissolved molecules, as well as how many are even out there, remain a nagging mystery — one that’s becoming more dire by the day as coral reefs worldwide lose a war against ocean warming, ocean acidification and human misuse and overuse.
