Common to both soft and hard corals is the polyp, a carnivorous animal related to sea anemones and jellyfish. However, unlike anemones corals are colonial - individual polyps divide themselves into daughter polyps and divide once again, growing to several feet in diameter. In reef-building corals, the polyp colony is joined together in one continuoushard lime skeleton. And although the polyps share the nutrition digested by the colony as a whole, each polyp is an individual animal.
