News from the Natural World: In a shocking twist a Coral Reef has scooped the top award at the Global Building & Design Awards 2020.
The GBD Awards is the biggest fixture on the calendar of the building and design world. It showcases the greatest talent in the world of design. The fiercest competition comes in the “Top Talent of the Year” category. This is because it is the pièce de résistance of the whole event. In a first for the building awards, a non-human was elected, Coral Reef. It was seen as a joke entry because no one thought it would win. To everyone’s surprise, Coral was voted the unanimous winner. This was a result of overwhelming evidence that showed its incomparable skill of building and design. They argued this skill was unique and only possessed by this enigmatic marine invertebrate.
Corals are marine invertebrates that live in compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. They are incredible reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton like a building. The Great Barrier Reef is the greatest living builder the world has ever known.
Coral Reef the greatest building of all time
New evidence shocked the crowd because it showed how old Coral Reefs are. The data showed that Coral had begun constructing the Great Barrier Reef two million years ago. Because of a constant process of fragmentation, and sand accumulation it had gradually created this colossal calcium carbonate structure. Also, coral creates reefs that are extremely diverse in marine ecosystems. They are also capable of supporting over 4,000 species of fish, massive numbers of mollusks, crustaceans, and many other animals.
In contrast, humanities’ oldest buildings date to around 10,000 years ago. Humans are very poor at creating buildings that support and sustain biodiversity in the long term. In most cases, large scale construction destroys and maims animals. Rather than supporting life, it destroys it and decimates the natural world.