Branching Coral

Nahema, voice log, go. This is a typical Protean coral, but it's not a typical *Earth* coral. Yeah, the gross morphology is a branching tree, like the extinct Acropora...but if you look inside, it gets weird.

On Earth, coral are little jellyfish who build stone houses. On Proteus...it's more like they moved into an apartment block. A sponge. The coral polyps lived in the sponge's pores...they paid rent by cleaning and protecting the sponge. Eventually some sponges turned hard and rocky, like Earth's sclerosponges.

If I'm right, we should see other coral-sponge pairs that have worked out different deals. Each deal suited to a particular ecological niche. The real question is....what is going on with these genetics?