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JB63
02/04/2010, 05:38 AM
I was just reading a thread on how sea-stars can regenerate wholly from just one limb. If this process can be repeated indefinitely, is this somehow Eternal Life? Or do some limbs ultimately die because of "cell aging" ? The same holds true for Coral colonies, while we all have seen dead coral skeletons, are those the result of some cataclysmic underwater event or, regular life/death cycle for the Corals.

There are corals that reproduce by continuous division (such as Acans and Favia), then there are others where a given polyp never splits in to (ZOAs)

Unlike "ordinary" animals, do individual colony polyps (in SPS/LPS) age and die?

zachfishman
02/04/2010, 07:55 AM
The summary in this first page preview of a study seems to lay it out. It's difficult to assess aging in coral colonies because they can live centuries. But it appears that (at least in this paper) senescence in a clonal Anthozoan was observed. It has also been observed in other clonal species such as starfish.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r606006614h66900/fulltext.pdf?page=1