Coral Evolution: From Socialists to Soloists

The solitary and appropriately named sun coral Tubastrea Faulkneri.

Last week’s blog post on the ancestry of the malarial plasmid attracted several insightful comments by Psi Wavefunction. One of the issues discussed was when exactly the malarial ancestor changed his lifestyle from being a coral symbiont to a coral parasite. This week I came across a paper in PNAS that shows that corals themselves [...]