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You don't have to put on a silly suit, breath through a tube, and fall through 100 ft of water to see scenes like this, and yet I did!
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The beautiful and photogenic Orange Cup Coral, Tubastrea coccinea. It was observed during a dive in Palau in the summer of 1992. It is native to the Indo-Pacific region but it has become an invasive species in the Atlantic, where it competes for space and food (plankton) with native corals. The watermark on the photo refers to the date I posted the photo at the now defunct website LightBox, not the actual observation. I do not remember the exact date and place of the observation, sorry.
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I'm not extremely confident about species-level ID for this. I dove here in Panama and then less than 2 days later in Curacao, and in both places I found Tubastraeas that I would independently have called T. coccinea, but the Panamanian ones had much larger polyps, so I imagine they are different species?
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A feast of color on a night dive...
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