Coral Garden

Our coral garden is so beautiful you may think that Alan Titchmarsh himself had donned his best scuba gear to create it. There is a wide range of colourful and interesting corals and anemones that grow together to produce an amazingly vibrant backdrop. These intelligent plants can’t live alone and need a diverse eco-system to survive and prosper. Our Coral Garden is full of fish and crustaceans that work with the coral to help each other. The fish eat the algae and dirt from the corals for sustenance and the coral in that process is having harmful bacteria cleaned from it. The key difference between corals and anemones is that corals are in fact living animals whereas anemones are flowering plants.

Coral reefs are very delicate which has led to most species ending up on the endangered or critically endangered. They are very sensitive to the smallest changes in temperature and natural changes in environment such as tropical storms that can break up the corals. This is why global warming can be so harmful for these creatures as the increased temperature cause the corals to expel zooxanthellae living in their tissues which makes the coral lose all colour and turn white. They don’t necessarily die from this but it can hurt their ability to grow. Although vital to the ocean coral reefs are also important to us as humans as we get food, protection of the shoreline and even medicine from these animals. Some of our corals have peculiar and unusual names that represent the way that they look such as the Knobbly Toadstool Coral and the Green Fuzzy Mushroom Coral which may help you identify them amongst the huge varied collection.