Lophelia
| Lophelia | ||||||||||
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Lophelia sp. |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Lophelia | ||||||||||
| Milne Edwards & Haime , 1849 |
Lophelia is a genus of hard corals (Scleractinia). Their colonies are bushy and heavily branched. Individual branches can be half a meter long. The polyps sit in thick-walled coralites (coral calyxes) and are glassy, beige or orange. In contrast to their tropical relatives, they do not live in a symbiosis with zooxanthellae , but instead feed exclusively by catching plankton . They grow an average of one centimeter a year. The two species Lophelia pertusa and Lophelia prolifera live worldwide in all oceans at depths between 60 and 2100 meters on hard floors. There are larger Lophelia reefs on the coast of Norway , around the Faroe Islands and on the continental slope west of the British Isles ( Rockall Trough ).
The reefs are still populated by the reef-forming stony coral Madrepora oculata , mollusks , arm pods , crustaceans and fish. The same characteristic fauna is called the Lophelia association.
On the coast of southern Norway there are fossil Lophelia sticks from the younger Pleistocene at an altitude of 100 meters above sea level. They must have originated when the land mass of the Scandinavian Peninsula was 150 meters lower than it is today due to the weight of the Ice Age ice sheet.
literature
- André Freiwald , JM Roberts eds. (2005): Cold-Water Corals and Ecosystems, 1243 pp., Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York.
- Gruner, H.-E., Hannemann, H.-J., Hartwich, G., Kilias, R .: Urania Tierreich, Invertebrates 1 (Protozoa to Echiurida) . Urania-Verlag, ISBN 3332005014
