Meeting Abstract
Xeniid corals form a special group within the soft corals (Alcyonacea) with some of their members displaying a unique pulsing behavior. Within a pulsing coral colony, each individual polyp actively pulses, increasing the local mixing and enhancing nutrient and gas exchange. When looking at a colony of pulsing corals, the first questions to come to mind are whether this behavior is coordinated and how. Our hypothesis is that the pulsing behavior is coordinated, and that the coordination is in part influenced by local flows sensed by the individual polyps, and in part influenced by internal (neural) signals between polyps. To test this hypothesis, we used ISOMAP, a computational algorithm designed to find patterns in video data. We also computed the transfer entropy between any given pair of polyps in a colony to quantify the transfer of information between members of a same colony. With this data, we are able to start investigating how patterns of collective pulsing behavior affect local flow and mixing around coral colonies.
