Quanta Magazine

Physicists and marine biologists built a quantitative framework that predicts how coral polyps collectively construct a variety of coral shapes.

Since before she could remember, Eva Llabrés was a snorkeler. Her grandfather, a fishmonger from the Spanish island of Menorca, bought Llabrés her first mask and fins; throughout childhood, she was in the Mediterranean, spotting octopuses, eels, seagrasses and bright starfish. The ocean was a home, but in school, Llabrés preferred physics and math. In Barcelona for college, she dove into the theoretical mysteries of black holes and quantum gravity. After earning her doctorate, she changed gears: She wanted to come back to Earth, and she landed in the ocean. There, she found a world of unanswered questions in the physics of coral.

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