Hello, it's your host, Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me to Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show,

the best way to do that is Send Me to Sleep Premium. Over there, you'll get ad-free episodes,

as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the

description notes. Thanks so much for listening, and here's just a few ads before the show begins.

I think you would be forgiven if when you first looked upon coral, you believed it to be just some kind of huge underwater rock garden or naturally occurring arrangement of aquatic plants of some sort.

And I know that that's certainly what I thought, honestly, until very recently, I was fortunate enough to visit the London Sea Life Aquarium.

Quite recently with my young son, who very much enjoyed seeing all of the aquatic life that they have on display there.

Quite beautiful to see all variety of animals that live under the sea.

And what was especially beautiful was their display of coral.

And there's something so beautifully mesmerizing about the colors and the patterns and the shapes and the slowly undulating.

I suppose you might call them tentacles of some of these coral.

As they move gently in the water.

And looking upon these corals, I honestly am not sure I knew myself precisely what they were, but the immediate instinct or assumption is that they are some kind of rock or plant or perhaps something akin to an underwater mushroom of some kind.

And it was only recently that I found out precisely what they were, which is in fact carnivorous animals,

which is highly unintuitive.

And this is probably why it took people so long to discover that this was the case.

We have records of the ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist Pliny the Elder describing Coral as a tertia natura,

as in a natural third thing, which is a term that he made up, because he was unable to distinguish coral as exactly a plant or an animal.

And so he put it into this box of third thing as he was

unable to

categorise it

and it was

...