Underwater, coral reefs can offer spectacular beauty with their colorful corals, fish, sponges, giant clams, and turtles. Coral reefs are like the rainforests of the seas. They provide people with countless goods and services, including food, shoreline protection, sacred spaces, and regulation of processes on earth that make our planet habitable.
For other species, coral reefs are life-giving. In the movie "Finding Nemo," Nemo lived in a sea anemone, in the shelter of a coral reef. Reefs are important nurseries for young fish and help to provide protection from predators and nutrients (food) for growth. But if you look even closer at life in the reef, you can find equally astounding creatures the size of your fingernail and even smaller. Creatures like tiny crabs, octopuses, worms, snails, starfish, and fishes exist there. Because of their size, these creatures are hard to find using traditional marine surveys, which only capture what the eye can see. These traditional methods include using divers to take photos of easy-to-see organisms and looking at pictures taken from space using satellites.

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