In warm seas the most conspicuous of rock-making organisms are the corals known as the reef builders.  Floating in a boat over a coral reef, as, for example, off the south coast of Florida or among the Bahamas, one looks down through clear water on thickets of branching coral shrubs perhaps as much as eight feet high, and hemispherical masses three or four feet thick, all abloom with countless minute flowerlike coral polyps, gorgeous in their colors of yellow, orange, green, and red.  In structure each tiny polyp is little more than a fleshy sac whose mouth is surrounded with petal-like tentacles, or feelers.  From the sea water the polyps secrete calcium carbonate and build it up into the stony framework which supports their colonies.  Boring mollusks, worms, and sponges perforate and honeycomb this framework even while its surface is covered with myriads of living polyps.  It is thus easily broken by the waves, and white fragments of coral trees strew the ground beneath.  Brilliantly colored fishes live in these coral groves, and countless mollusks, sea urchins, and other forms of marine life make here their home.  With the debris from all these sources the reef is constantly built up until it rises to low-tide level.  Higher than this the corals cannot grow, since they are killed by a few hours’ exposure to the air.

When the reef has risen to wave base, the waves abrade it on the windward side and pile to leeward coral blocks torn from their foundation, filling the interstices with finer fragments.  Thus they heap up along the reef low, narrow islands (Fig. 160).

Reef building is a comparatively rapid progress.  It has been estimated that off Florida a reef could be built up to the surface from a depth of fifty feet in about fifteen hundred years.

Coral limestones.  Limestones of various kinds are due to the reef builders.  The reef rock is made of corals in place and broken fragments of all sizes, cemented together with calcium carbonate from solution by infiltrating waters.  On the island beaches coral sand is forming oolitic limestone, and the white coral mud with which the sea is milky for miles about the reef in times of storm settles and concretes into a compact limestone of finest grain.  Corals have been among the most important limestone builders of the sea ever since they made their appearance in the early geological ages.

The areas on which coral limestone is now forming are large.  The Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which lies off the north-eastern coast, is twelve hundred and fifty miles long, and has a width of from ten to ninety miles.  Most of the islands of the tropics are either skirted with coral reefs or are themselves of coral formation.

Conditions of coral growth.  Reef-building corals cannot live except in clear salt water less, as a rule, than one hundred and fifty feet in depth, with a winter temperature not lower than 68 degrees F. An important condition also is an abundant food supply, and this is best secured in the path of the warm oceanic currents.