A new exhibition hall with temporary charges (free for the elderly and children) has been opened, and the exhibits in it are mainly "corals". At the entrance of the exhibition hall, there is a semi-circular coral with a diameter of about two meters and a height of more than one meter, which shows the theme of the exhibition hall.
"Coral" is a large group of small marine life called "coral", which is made of corpses.
Coral is very small, only the size of a grain of rice. It is a spiny creature (spiny is a family and a genus under the Compendium of Animals). There are eight spiny tentacles around its body, and each tentacle has a mouth in the center to absorb marine carbon dioxide and calcium, and then it synthesizes calcium, mainly calcium carbonate, and secretes it to build its own shell. This kind of shells gather together to form "corals" with different postures and colorful colors. Most of the strange and spectacular underwater scenes we see in movies and TV plays are corals.
Generally speaking, corals include soft corals, gorgonian corals, red corals, stony corals, light corals and coral reefs. Among them, stony corals are divided into reef-building corals and non-reef-building corals. What we usually call "coral reef" is formed by the accumulation of bones of reef-building corals.
"Coral reef" is the calcium carbonate skeleton of countless corals, which was formed during the growth of hundreds of millions of years. It is the habitat, shelter and food production base of a quarter of species in the ocean.
How do corals grow and reproduce?
Most corals are hermaphroditic, that is, mature corals have two sets of organs, male and female. They reproduce in two ways: sexually and asexually. Asexual reproduction is also called "budding reproduction", that is, hermaphroditic corals give birth to new buds near tentacles, which grow and grow into new individuals. Sexual reproduction is that male and female corals excrete sperm and eggs from their mouths, combine them into fertilized eggs in water, and then attach them to other objects, accumulating to form corals.
Coral is a social species, often gathering in the depths below 50 meters above sea level and distributed in the oceans of the world. Archaeological discovery, the earliest discovery of coral is in the Mediterranean coast.
From the beginning of the first century AD, with the businessmen from the Middle East doing business in the ocean, coral was brought to India as a rare commodity with strange shapes and beautiful colors and sold at a high price, and then gradually introduced to East Asia.
Coral was priceless in ancient times. There was a very rich man named "Shi Chong" in the Jin Dynasty. He once competed with a great official, Wang Kai, and the treasure of the town house that Wang Kai took out was a coral tree given to him by Emperor Wu of Jin. Shi Shuo Xin Yu Fei describes it like this:
Wang Kai is the uncle of Emperor Wu of Jin Dynasty and the grandson of Stuart Wang Lang in Cao Wei period. At that time, the official position was "General Long Xiang" and he was appointed as "General Xiao Qi". Such figures, together with Shi Chong, an enemy tycoon at that time, all held coral trees, showing that in ancient times, coral was a top rare treasure.
Coral shows signs of the sixth extinction;
On March 3, 2020, many universities and ocean research centers in the United States, Germany, Israel and other countries published a report in the magazine Science Report, saying that corals have shown "disaster characteristics" very similar to the last mass extinction on earth, which indicates that a new mass extinction may have arrived:
Will we feel "shocked" when we see the above passage? Can this result be postponed or even avoided?
It depends on whether we humans have enough awareness of environmental protection. Enough awareness of marine protection? Can we avoid further harm of human activities to our living environment as much as possible?
Human activities that endanger the living environment include: modern domestic garbage cannot be properly classified and treated; Industrial development consumes a lot of energy, resulting in excessive "carbon emissions" to warm the earth; Excessive marine fishing has destroyed the marine ecosystem; Marine engineering activities such as land reclamation have destroyed the coral reef structure.
The earth is our home and the ocean is the cradle of life. Let's act! It is our bounden duty to protect our earth environment and the cradle of life for our future generations. The ancients also had the consciousness of "saving space and leaving it to future generations to plow the fields". We contemporary people, influenced by modern science, should not be inferior to the ancients in consciousness.
Because they were so engrossed in the exhibition hall, they had to explain to the children. Unconsciously, the staff of the exhibition hall came and drove us out, saying that we would close the museum and get off work. We have to leave with unfinished business. When I drove home, the lights on the road were already on and the figure was the narrowest.
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