Isabella Rossellini and IFC may have highlighted the delightfully quirky mating habits of everything from dragonflies to snakes, but a local art/scientific collective is diving deep to reveal the sex behavior of spectacular sea creatures.
Coral Morphologic is Colin Foord and Jared McKay, who dive South Florida's ocean floor, collect and clone mysterious sea creatures, and then create amazing multimedia art of their vivid colors and hypnotic movements.
"These animals are living art forms," Foord recently told the Miami New Times. And as it turns out, these creatures' mating habits are just as beautiful.
In a rare occurrence, Foord and McKay were fortunate enough to catch one of their fluorescent green flower anemone's spawning last week, suddenly filling the tank with its life-giving sperm for almost 30 minutes.
Watch the video below.
In addition to making a beautifully hypnotic video, the event means that anemones' mating habits are linked to the changing of the seasons as opposed to environmental cues like sunlight. Around the same month last year, the marine duo observed 12 sea flowers spawning in synch while in an outdoor aquarium with natural UV light.
Based on Coral Morphologic's observations, the sea flowers seem to "get busy" an hour before sunset, typically between the hours of 5 and 6 in the afternoon whether they are living under natural or artificial sunlight.
When Patterson Sims, renowned curator of American art, was recently in town scoping Miami's arts scene for the newly launched The Miami Rail, he claimed Coral Morphologic's "scientific and artistic exploration of living coral reef organisms via site-specific artworks and HD videography radiated the most beautiful and unexpected work" he saw.
Vice magazine's Hunter Stephenson even went as far as to underscore the collective's essential role in South Florida's identity by stating that "Jimmy Buffett should be forced to donate his skull to Coral Morphologic tomorrow as collateral damage for synonymizing the sea’s charms with the human garbage better known as parrotheads."
Click below for the amazing video of a sea flower releasing its sperm in a rarely documented spawning event as well as four other beautiful videos from Coral Morphologic's aquatic portfolio:
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