When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars...
A good friend of mine - Gerry Ragni (and writing partner James Rado) - wrote that haunting piece of music for the hit stage show - "Hair".
Today, scientists are discovering how potent the Moon's "pull" is; not only does it turn the tides of the great seas, but it appears to be meddling at the very core of Mother Nature's cosmic reach.
Apparently, as a full moon hangs in a dark sky - under balmy tropical climatic conditions - corals beneath the chaffing surface of the breathtaking ocean, dissolve into a hotbed of reproductive activity - sowing trillions of eggs.
At this juncture, sperm swirsl and coalesces into vibrant new life forms!
Essentially, the event amounts to a mystical rite of procreation.
The remarkable event was discovered by astounded scientists in 1981 who remain puzzled about the specifics.
While it is evident that the moon rules the synchronized spawning, specialists in the field scratch their heads and wonder...are the subjects themselves aware of the phases and keen to the moment when the "cosmic dance" must occur?
Surprisingly, these primitive life forms have photo receptors, which have the ability to "perceive".
Amazingly, the photosensitive chemicals in the sea, respond to moonlight; yes, the silvery rays actually trigger impulses in the life forms far below in the inky dark sea.
The finding is significant.
"When I talk about thousands of reefs in the Caribbean releasing their spawn within minutes of each other during a specific phase of the moon, people marvel and ask how do they do it," smiled Alina M. Szmant, a coral expert at the University of North Carolina.
Systematically, the puzzle is being put together piece by piece as the startling clues filter in.
The whole occurrence not only sheds light on coral reproduction, but reveals a lot about evolution itself, scientists assert.
In fact, light receptors may have existed eons ago early in the development of animals. In essence, the discovery of basic mechanism for responding to light indicates they were in place at the origin of multi-cellularity in animals.
Coral reefs are aragonite structures produced by living organisms found in shallow tropical marine waters with little or no nutrients in the water.
In most reefs (the predominant organisms are stony corals) colonial cnidarians secrete an exoskeleton of calcium carbonate. The accumulation of skeletal material (created by constant ongoing wave action and bioeroders) produces a massive calcareous formation that supports the living corals and a great variety of other animal and plant life.
Although corals are found both in temperate and tropical waters, reefs are only formed in a zone extending at most from 30°N to 30°S of the equator. Also, it is an accepted norm that the exotic sea formations do not generally thrive in waters below 18 °C.
Now, the once-firm belief that coral formations were primitive creatures with no brain or eyes is quickly fading! The misconception fell apart when investigations in the early eighties revealed that swirling eggs and sperm merged and floated away, formed embryonic corals that sank to the ocean floor, and - when conditions were right - found the colonies.
The Moon's phase is definitely important because it controls the tides.
Because some tides are high and others are low, it has been further established that the moon simply acts as a clock to choreograph the mating among one hundred species of coral.
That's quite a task; after all, it's a monumental effort to orchestrate my own!
