'Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought, ‘rather exuberant language’. The marine biologist Juli Berwald was more impressed. She describes her first encounter with a coral reef as ‘love at first sight’. The reef was ‘awash in colour ... beyond Baroque ... each delicate petal and tendril was a revelation; each filigree and lattice an astonishment.’ She had one thing Darwin didn’t: a snorkel.'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/liam-shaw/in-the-photic-zone