Spontaneous branching in a polyp oriented model of stony coral growth.

A three-dimensional model of diffusion limited coral growth is introduced. As opposed to previous models, in the model we take a "polyp oriented" approach. Here, coral morphogenesis is the result of the collective behaviour of the individual coral polyps. In the polyp oriented model, branching occurs spontaneously, as opposed to previous models in which an explicit curvature rule was responsible for branching. We discuss the mechanism of branching in our model. Also, the effects of polyp spacing on the morphology are studied.

Merks, R.M.H., Hoekstra, A.G., Kaandorp, J.A., Sloot, P.M.A. (2002) Spontaneous branching in a polyp oriented model of stony coral growth. Lect. Notes in Comput. Sci. 2329, 88-96. In P.M.A. Sloot, C.J. Kenneth Tan, Jack J. Dongarra, and Alfons G. Hoekstra, editors, International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS).

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