What Are Gorgonians????

Añadido: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Have you ever heard of a gorggonian?

[00:00:03]We're going to talk about those today. I think the reason why I want to talk about gorggonians is because people see them. People have seen them. They just assume they're plants. So, I'm going to teach you something new today.

[00:00:14]Gorggonians are part of the soft coral family. They are in their own separate genus. And what is makes them different than their hard coral cousins is that they don't actually have a skeleton, nor do they actually produce or grow reefs.

[00:00:29]They do still have the eight-fold symmetry that other soft corals are going to have, but they are again classified a little differently. But again, just like hard coral cousins as well as soft coral cousins, all the corals are made up of these little tiny individual animals called polyps and they live on a structure together.

[00:00:47]What's really interesting is gorggonians specifically, they will grow perpendicular to the current. And this is so they can actively filter out food like plankton and detritis, which is dead plant material or just dead material and tissue in general. Gonians get their name because the axis, which is the actual structure, the skeletal structure that the polyp live on, kind of looks like a dead tree. This is made out of a protein called gargonin. Some of them will have the sclerites which is another form of protein that builds the structure where the polyps can live on.

[00:01:26]And most soft tissue corals are made from scarites. It's just gorggonians are separated because of that gorggon protein instead. I've also mentioned that they have eight-fold symmetry. And I realize I didn't really discuss that further. Eight-fold symmetry is just when the polyps have eight tentacles or are in multiples of eight. There are thousands of gorggonian species out there from sea plumes to sea fans, some of which you've probably seen before and maybe didn't know what they were and now you do. Unfortunately, ocean acidification is causing a detriment to gorggonian populations and that is causing a huge impact on the ecosystem.