Coral Reef

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor — and support roughly a quarter of all known marine species. Ours packs that density into one glowing tank.

Overview

Inside the exhibit.

Step into the Coral Reef gallery and the water itself seems to change color — clouds of clownfish shelter inside swaying anemones, a school of blue tang flashes past in unison, and parrotfish graze along the coral structure, doing the reef’s daily work of turning old coral into fine white sand. It’s one of the densest, most biodiverse tanks in the building, and that’s true to life: coral reefs cover under 1% of the ocean floor worldwide but support close to a quarter of all marine species, making them some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet, reef for reef.

The coral itself is a mix of aquacultured stony and soft coral colonies, grown from small fragments rather than collected from the wild — a technique called coral fragging that’s let public aquariums like ours stop drawing on wild reefs entirely while still keeping real, living coral on exhibit.