Is this coral?

[Togath]

So a relative showed me something they found on the beach today and...
I'm honestly not sure what the heck it is.
It's a series of very small segments attached to eachother in a branching/fan-like arrangement, white, and seems to be of a shell-like material. It's also a tad fragile.
We're up in Washington State, by the Puget Sound... so I'm curious, does this fit any corals(or other things) from the region that anyone here knows of? I'd always thought the waters were far too cold for anything even close to coral to live.:smallconfused:

[Razade]

How could we possibly tell you without a picture? Did he get it from Washington? Did he get it from somewhere else? The information is sparse and...yeah. I don't honestly know what you expected anyone to say with so little information.

[scalyfreak]

While your description makes it sound like coral, it also fits several other substances. Do you have a picture you can share?

[Togath]

Best picture I could get;
http://i.imgur.com/lLDsriP.jpg
It was obtained on a beach near Port Townsend Washington(sorry if I had not made the location clear), and was apparently more intact when she picked it up. Sounds like it started to fall apart from being moved too much and the vibrations of the car ride back.

[enderlord99]

To me it looks kind of like dried-out seaweed... but that stuff's usually brown. I dunno.

[scalyfreak]

Huh. That could be some kind of coral, potentially.

Coral feels like stone to the touch (I have a necklace made from it). If it's brittle, it's probably not coral as most of us think of it.

[Togath]

It does feel stony, but it's also VERY thin. Like each prong is only a handful of millimeters across.

[Delicious Taffy]

Could it be some sort of bones? Those tend to gather near the water, if there's fish around.

[Togath]

Not of any skeleton I've ever seen:smalleek:. Plus bones tend to be more tough than hard.

[Delicious Taffy]

Not of any skeleton I've ever seen:smalleek:. Plus bones tend to be more tough than hard.

Well, the good news is that you seem to be on the wrong coast for it to be from a shoggoth. The bad news is, it's probably not a shoggoth.

[Comissar]

It doesn't look like a coral to me, but if it feels crunchy then it's almost certainly some kind of calcite. I don't think it's a worm tube, it's too clearly segmented for that, and the branching doesn't fit. It might be a bryozoan if it's really small, but again the shape of it doesn't fit. My best guess would be some kind of calcareous algae.

[Ninja_Prawn]

To me it looks kind of like dried-out seaweed... but that stuff's usually brown. I dunno.

I believe we have a winner!

My money's on Corallina officinalis, known as coral weed, a kind of seaweed. It looks like this:

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/EADBBX/common-coral-weed-coralweed-corallina-officinalis-washed-ashore-on-EADBBX.jpg

[Serpentine]

It looks/sounds to me like a coralline algae (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coralline_algae) or similar. IIRC back to my marine sciences days, their process of calcifying is similar to that of coral.

[Togath]

Aha! Fascinating. That does seem to match!~
Never knew that sorta stuff existed until now. It seems really cool.:smallbiggrin:

[cobaltstarfire]

Only tangentially related but I bet you'll find it interesting.


I'd always thought the waters were far too cold for anything even close to coral to live.


There is such a thing as cold water coral, but they aren't really as well known or popularized. I know that it lives very deep and doesn't need sunlight like most well known corals. (and according to wikipedia at least, there is a deep sea coral reef off the coast of Washington, as well as places like the UK and Norway)

[Cedar]

This (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcyonium_digitatum) stuff is plenty in the North Sea, not sure if it's also found in deeper sea, but I know it's present in shallow cold sea:

http://www.ecomare.nl/typo3temp/GB/a5bf9a340c.png (http://www.ecomare.nl/ecomare-encyclopedie/organismen/dieren/ongewervelde-dieren/holtedieren/koralen/dodemansduim/)

There are also loads of 'soft' corals on any hard substrates (which are not extremely common in all regions of the North Sea, because it has loads of sand.

[Aliquid]

Something quite local:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/live-stream-glass-sponge-1.4109423

[tantric]

it's the skeleton of the calcareous macroalgae Halimeda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halimeda) sps

http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/nature/otherlife/images/halimeda52422s.jpg