So this gold coral originally started on a bamboo coral and it overgrew that skeleton and then started growing its own skeleton.
It's like putting a glove on your hand, it's fully covered by the gold coral tissue.
And there's a period of time where the gold coral tissue can consume the host rapidly,
and then it's very slow growth after that.
This is a prime example of a before and after shot,
you have the bamboo coral on the right side and the gold coral on the left.
There is a bamboo coral that looks like it is in its first stage of being colonized by a gold coral colony.
So we say that this coral is in the Midas stage of turning to gold.
These corals grow extremely slowly, so to have something this large, it's likely that this colony is possibly 2,000 years old.