Nice to read a paper that's looking for paths of persistence instead of only documenting decline. Climate stories often end with "thing are getting worse", this one also asks where ecosystems might still persist if local conditions are managed well.
Related, I recently read an article about staghorn corals surviving in Miami of all places [1]. They resisted bleaching, pollution and inundations with fresh water. The origin of this resistance is apparently colonization by a different species of algae that is otherwise native to the western Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The biodiversity in West Africa in general is completely underrated. I mean, Darwin solidified his trajectory in life a few short days after the Beagle anchored off of Cape Verde (a place he initially detested then fell in love with).
I'm hoping that Cape Verde's World Cup success story translates to more eye balls on stories like this (with the mere mention of the country landing it in search results). Which means more attention, money and research to West Africa's relatively fragile but diverse ecosystem.
There are 6 floristic kingdoms in the world, and Fynbos can only be found in a tiny section of Africa.
When I was there it was wild to see a completely different array of plants and flowers. There is one small white flower that had petals that felt like some sort of sythentic material. There is a whole world that very few people experience or even know exists.
I work with Hybrid Reefs out of Scripps in San Diego. Daniel is an amazing dude, Moore fellow, and prolific inventor. If you can help, there’s contact info on the website. https://www.hybridreefs.com/
Coral Vita is the trailblazer in the for profit category, first coral Series A (2025). I don’t know them yet though. https://www.coralvita.co
Reefstarter was backed by my friends at SOSV. They design coastal barriers. Great team. East coast for any of you Floridians. https://www.reefstarter.net/
There’s more but there’s a few off the top.
In general the US is primarily focused on erosion control since the beaches are disappearing. Coral is more an afterthought especially with the gutting of all our science. Australia is really leading the way here with AIMS and Saudi has KAUST. Big ups to the Paul Allen Foundation though, they gave Scripps $10M a few years back.
Fun stat to end with: coral reefs are responsible for over $10T in annual economic value. They get less than $1B a year to ensure they stick around. We’re gonna change that.
The irony surely being that the "economic value" here supposedly worth $10T is, ultimately, the very cause of their undoing (human economic activity is somewhat directly correlated with environmental destruction). Personally I'd prefer to live in a world where we saved coral reefs for their own sake and not for their economic value.
Still, it's a detail. Well done for the amazing work you're doing. We all depend on people like you and the organizations you mention.
No. Plenty of people are in that boat - look at youth unemployment in many countries - or housewives. And yet somehow workers seem to do the most creative work.
This is so off-topic to corals, but I feel I need to address your two comments - one you are saying housewives don't do any labour? My wife isn't currently in paid employment but likely puts in more hours per day supporting our family in a multitude of different ways, thank I do at work/commuting. Despite this unseen labour, I know many housewives who do find time for creativity a multitude of different ways.
Re unemployment - back when basic necessities were met, the KLF wrote a book about about going on the dole and unleashing your creativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
I’ve always been curious as to the level of success these programs achieve compared to just letting nature respond on its own. There are many cases where “dead” areas come back to life with abundance and give me pause as to whether we should for the most part just get out of natures way.
They can only survive short duration events. At some point the temp and time is too much and they die. The only way they come back is reintroduction.
We’ve lost over 50% of the reefs and are expected to lose 90% by 2050.
There are many amazing solutions. Some use corals more resistant to heat stress. Australia has seen some promising results with seed boxes. I know of a few other amazing solutions currently in the lab.
We have already gotten in natures way. So now we need to help nature with our technology.
"So now we need to help nature with our technology."
I guess the best help, would be stop getting into natures way so brutally, but since transforming the whole industry takes time and making people aware and care is even harder, some technical solutions to offset some damage is of course welcome.
I recall reading that the corals can reproduce both sexually and by cloning, with most in nature using cloning. The researchers brought them back to a lab and bred a bunch of them and found a lot of offspring could thrive in the warmer more acidic water, so they wanted to reintroduce them to a reef (or maybe they had). Been a while but it was interesting. Not sure what it takes to shift away from cloning in nature, but waiting for most the reef to die off seems backwards ;-)
I would suppose getting out of nature's way happens in one of two ways - infrequently because there is nothing of value in an area left to extract so people leave it alone, or infrequently because there is regulation forcing people to leave it alone.
Homeostasis, that was probably an option for most of nature in the 1950s or something, I think the damage is too great to just leave the reefs, forrests and other habitats to "fend for themselves". Even if what you say is true from an environmental perspective, we also have to fight to protect these areas from exploitation from fisherman, mining etc.
> Zinzindohoué agrees: “We don’t need to wait for others to come to our country to show us what is under our sea. We are the ones who must take responsibility.
And for those commenting about risk from tourism, this is mesophotic coral at 175 feet. It’s out of range of recreational scuba much less shallow-reef snorkelers. Only technical divers can reach this reef. That’s why it hadn’t even been explored for all this time.
vaguely related I read a fascinating story the other day about basically garbage dumping of leftover oyster/clam shells being used to re-seed a marine ecosystem off the Florida Keys
And to be clear, in GP's link, living oysters do show up, but they weren't put there deliberately (the shells and every other development provided the larvae with places to grow and establish themselves). The NY project started with oyster larvae placed on discarded shells to deliberately create the new environment with an oyster population.
did this start as just shells? Because I remember reading something a long time ago about this and they were just putting shells in the bay in metal cages.
Amazing that they're actually progressing on a billion oysters. That's incredible. I wonder when it becomes self sustaining, and just reaches a billion on it's own.
> As part of the strategy, discarded oyster shells from over 70 New York restaurants are collected and left outside for a year to be naturally cleansed of organic matter. Baby oysters are then placed on the shells by students at New York Harbor School, a maritime-focused public high school located on Governors Island. [10]
yeah, I read it. But what I remember is that they weren't doing the baby oyster thing, but just collecting the shells and putting them in cages so that they don't float away, and then dropping them into the bottom of the Hudson. It's definitely been over a decade since I read the article though, so could be mistaken.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The comment is flippant but IMO it's also a pithy summary of an important argument in this debate. To which some of the responses are thoughtful and substantive.
Tangential: I quite often slap down comments for much the same reasons you're using. No objections there, in fact I wish more people would do it.
Very few people travel to visit the Amazon especially in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. In the absence of tourist money these amazing ecosystems are being turned into agriculture and logged. In the protected areas supported by eco tourism the sound of the insects is deafening. But a few miles away in the banana plantations the area is completely silent. Even on “organic” banana plantations every insect is killed.
I walk an old logging trail near my house. 5 years or so ago I was walking and came across a lady slipper. Then another and another. I stopped counting at around 100. I've never seen so many in one place. It was incredible. I stopped taking people there when they've bloomed to help preserve them. It's a free and public place, but on a lightly travelled road so it doesn't actually get much traffic. Anyone that takes that walk at the right time of year will see them, but I've no interest in helping the inevitable happen if word gets out.
You don't even need to actively censor it; it's human nature to not only solely pay attention to bad news, but also to amplify it. It's generally true for all mammals, but they scale of things we're conscious of is orders of magnitude larger than any other mammal species.
It changes the composition of the forest to make it more flammable.
I don’t understand your coral comment. The coral expels the algae because the temp causes it to expel harmful toxins. There are other triggers besides heat.
Not in developing countries. Especially not when in the commons (e.g. territorial waters). Awareness + western tourism is often the only way these things get protected.
i have a zinc/beeswax sunscreen, the thing is damn near impossible to get off, definitely WAY more water resistant than normal so called waterproof sunscreen
Nice to read a paper that's looking for paths of persistence instead of only documenting decline. Climate stories often end with "thing are getting worse", this one also asks where ecosystems might still persist if local conditions are managed well.
I'm just now reading _Ocean_ by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield, which includes many stories like this. Would recommend!
Related, I recently read an article about staghorn corals surviving in Miami of all places [1]. They resisted bleaching, pollution and inundations with fresh water. The origin of this resistance is apparently colonization by a different species of algae that is otherwise native to the western Pacific and Indian Oceans.
[1] https://www.biographic.com/the-corals-that-shouldnt-exist/
The biodiversity in West Africa in general is completely underrated. I mean, Darwin solidified his trajectory in life a few short days after the Beagle anchored off of Cape Verde (a place he initially detested then fell in love with).
I'm hoping that Cape Verde's World Cup success story translates to more eye balls on stories like this (with the mere mention of the country landing it in search results). Which means more attention, money and research to West Africa's relatively fragile but diverse ecosystem.
There are 6 floristic kingdoms in the world, and Fynbos can only be found in a tiny section of Africa.
When I was there it was wild to see a completely different array of plants and flowers. There is one small white flower that had petals that felt like some sort of sythentic material. There is a whole world that very few people experience or even know exists.
This source appears to have more images and info: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...
We'll put that link in the toptext as well. Thanks!
For the coral lovers. There are multiple companies working on reef preservation. They are woefully under resourced. If you can help, please do.
You should give some names if you personally know them.
I work with Hybrid Reefs out of Scripps in San Diego. Daniel is an amazing dude, Moore fellow, and prolific inventor. If you can help, there’s contact info on the website. https://www.hybridreefs.com/
Coral Vita is the trailblazer in the for profit category, first coral Series A (2025). I don’t know them yet though. https://www.coralvita.co
https://coral.org is a 501c3. One of my friends is on the board.
Other fun stuff.
Mars runs one of the most prolific programs: https://www.buildingcoral.com/
Reefstarter was backed by my friends at SOSV. They design coastal barriers. Great team. East coast for any of you Floridians. https://www.reefstarter.net/
There’s more but there’s a few off the top.
In general the US is primarily focused on erosion control since the beaches are disappearing. Coral is more an afterthought especially with the gutting of all our science. Australia is really leading the way here with AIMS and Saudi has KAUST. Big ups to the Paul Allen Foundation though, they gave Scripps $10M a few years back.
Fun stat to end with: coral reefs are responsible for over $10T in annual economic value. They get less than $1B a year to ensure they stick around. We’re gonna change that.
The irony surely being that the "economic value" here supposedly worth $10T is, ultimately, the very cause of their undoing (human economic activity is somewhat directly correlated with environmental destruction). Personally I'd prefer to live in a world where we saved coral reefs for their own sake and not for their economic value.
Still, it's a detail. Well done for the amazing work you're doing. We all depend on people like you and the organizations you mention.
I’m with you re saving them. It’s always been crazy to me how much capitalism undervalues the irreplaceable things that make this world so special.
I appreciate it. It’s an uphill battle but it’s worth it.
You'd prefer to live in a world where labor is free and we don't need to work for anything? I like the current world better.
How can you say that without experiencing the other world? If people didn’t need to work to live the creativity unleashed would be insane.
No. Plenty of people are in that boat - look at youth unemployment in many countries - or housewives. And yet somehow workers seem to do the most creative work.
This is so off-topic to corals, but I feel I need to address your two comments - one you are saying housewives don't do any labour? My wife isn't currently in paid employment but likely puts in more hours per day supporting our family in a multitude of different ways, thank I do at work/commuting. Despite this unseen labour, I know many housewives who do find time for creativity a multitude of different ways.
Re unemployment - back when basic necessities were met, the KLF wrote a book about about going on the dole and unleashing your creativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
Lmao some people just don’t get it.
No, we'd prefer a world in which we don't destroy the environment for the sole purpose of creating more unneeded and largely useless widgets.
> I like the current world better.
Think about that in the next years when you finally realise how screwed we are.
> coral reefs are responsible for over $10T in annual economic value.
Chatgpt’s assessment of this claim: “not well supported by the mainstream literature and is likely misleading.”
Congratulations on your comprehensive research! I researched this prior and found sources for all my numbers. What’s your counterclaim if not $10T?
I’ve always been curious as to the level of success these programs achieve compared to just letting nature respond on its own. There are many cases where “dead” areas come back to life with abundance and give me pause as to whether we should for the most part just get out of natures way.
Here’s one successful example that only worked because of human intervention: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308123248.h...
They can only survive short duration events. At some point the temp and time is too much and they die. The only way they come back is reintroduction.
We’ve lost over 50% of the reefs and are expected to lose 90% by 2050.
There are many amazing solutions. Some use corals more resistant to heat stress. Australia has seen some promising results with seed boxes. I know of a few other amazing solutions currently in the lab.
We have already gotten in natures way. So now we need to help nature with our technology.
"So now we need to help nature with our technology."
I guess the best help, would be stop getting into natures way so brutally, but since transforming the whole industry takes time and making people aware and care is even harder, some technical solutions to offset some damage is of course welcome.
Unless we change the incentives, people will continue strip mining everything. I do have hope though as there is a lot that can still be done.
Don't they just sprout in deeper (cooler) water?
Only the deep water corals. The photosynthesizing type that most people are familiar with need light.
I recall reading that the corals can reproduce both sexually and by cloning, with most in nature using cloning. The researchers brought them back to a lab and bred a bunch of them and found a lot of offspring could thrive in the warmer more acidic water, so they wanted to reintroduce them to a reef (or maybe they had). Been a while but it was interesting. Not sure what it takes to shift away from cloning in nature, but waiting for most the reef to die off seems backwards ;-)
One major issue though is diversity. Many coral gardeners use fragments to clone one type over and over.
Also pests aquariums have some of the toughest pests imaginable
Algae is prolific!
I would suppose getting out of nature's way happens in one of two ways - infrequently because there is nothing of value in an area left to extract so people leave it alone, or infrequently because there is regulation forcing people to leave it alone.
Homeostasis, that was probably an option for most of nature in the 1950s or something, I think the damage is too great to just leave the reefs, forrests and other habitats to "fend for themselves". Even if what you say is true from an environmental perspective, we also have to fight to protect these areas from exploitation from fisherman, mining etc.
Yep you’ll see most stats base off ~1950. This is when we started noticing and especially in the ensuing decades as SCUBA equipment got good.
Homeostasis is unnatural.
> Zinzindohoué agrees: “We don’t need to wait for others to come to our country to show us what is under our sea. We are the ones who must take responsibility.
Yet, they didn’t.
And for those commenting about risk from tourism, this is mesophotic coral at 175 feet. It’s out of range of recreational scuba much less shallow-reef snorkelers. Only technical divers can reach this reef. That’s why it hadn’t even been explored for all this time.
Isn’t this whole article about how they’re doing so right now?
More details on the Deep Sea Camera System used here:
https://www.dev.nationalgeographic.org/society/our-programs/...
https://github.com/NGS-Exploration-Technology/Deep-Sea-Camer...
vaguely related I read a fascinating story the other day about basically garbage dumping of leftover oyster/clam shells being used to re-seed a marine ecosystem off the Florida Keys
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/florida-dumped-h...
they were doing that in New York as well if I'm not mistaken
NYC even dumps their old subway cars to create coral reefs:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-subway-cars-turning...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Oyster_Project - Different effort, this one is about putting out living oysters, not just shells as GP was talking about.
And to be clear, in GP's link, living oysters do show up, but they weren't put there deliberately (the shells and every other development provided the larvae with places to grow and establish themselves). The NY project started with oyster larvae placed on discarded shells to deliberately create the new environment with an oyster population.
did this start as just shells? Because I remember reading something a long time ago about this and they were just putting shells in the bay in metal cages.
Amazing that they're actually progressing on a billion oysters. That's incredible. I wonder when it becomes self sustaining, and just reaches a billion on it's own.
> As part of the strategy, discarded oyster shells from over 70 New York restaurants are collected and left outside for a year to be naturally cleansed of organic matter. Baby oysters are then placed on the shells by students at New York Harbor School, a maritime-focused public high school located on Governors Island. [10]
yeah, I read it. But what I remember is that they weren't doing the baby oyster thing, but just collecting the shells and putting them in cages so that they don't float away, and then dropping them into the bottom of the Hudson. It's definitely been over a decade since I read the article though, so could be mistaken.
YAY!
reading all those easily solved frictions they encountered was sad
The less people know, the better. These places are better left untouched by humanity.
[dead]
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The comment is flippant but IMO it's also a pithy summary of an important argument in this debate. To which some of the responses are thoughtful and substantive.
Tangential: I quite often slap down comments for much the same reasons you're using. No objections there, in fact I wish more people would do it.
I think you're right. Thanks.
Thanks :)
Very few people travel to visit the Amazon especially in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. In the absence of tourist money these amazing ecosystems are being turned into agriculture and logged. In the protected areas supported by eco tourism the sound of the insects is deafening. But a few miles away in the banana plantations the area is completely silent. Even on “organic” banana plantations every insect is killed.
I walk an old logging trail near my house. 5 years or so ago I was walking and came across a lady slipper. Then another and another. I stopped counting at around 100. I've never seen so many in one place. It was incredible. I stopped taking people there when they've bloomed to help preserve them. It's a free and public place, but on a lightly travelled road so it doesn't actually get much traffic. Anyone that takes that walk at the right time of year will see them, but I've no interest in helping the inevitable happen if word gets out.
Not having heard of this plant before, I was rather confused why people would leave so much footwear on this trail.
Apologies, I assumed common knowledge when I shouldn't have. It's a lovely orchid that resembles a slipper.
Here's a link from the USDA Forest Service:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/cyprip...
haha yes, 100% thought this was about someone dumping used shoes in a pristine area before your comment.
I listen to too many crime podcasts. My mind was going, one slipper, the second slipper, then the body.
Or all of those feet in BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discover...
try botany:
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA
Yeah, only publish stories about coral bleaching, animals going extinct, and forest fires. Censor any good news at all costs!
You don't even need to actively censor it; it's human nature to not only solely pay attention to bad news, but also to amplify it. It's generally true for all mammals, but they scale of things we're conscious of is orders of magnitude larger than any other mammal species.
Pretty sure they meant it sarcastically …
Forest fires are natural.
Coral bleaching seems too actually be a sign of prosperity, not suffering.
Glyphosate has made forest fires worse.
Bleaching happens when the symbiosis breaks down due to elevated temps. That is due to suffering and causes suffering.
>Glyphosate has made forest fires worse.
How? How does this work?
>Bleaching happens when the symbiosis breaks down due to elevated temps.
The first part is correct, the second is unknown. In 2016, 84% of corals bleached, the highest number. Did global warming peak in 2016?
I admit, saying "prosperity" was provocative. It's probably not a sign of prosperity. But what exactly it is a sign of, we have little idea.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/glyphosate-spraying-w...
It changes the composition of the forest to make it more flammable.
I don’t understand your coral comment. The coral expels the algae because the temp causes it to expel harmful toxins. There are other triggers besides heat.
I'm not a big fan of synthetic chemicals in the food supply but I can't help wondering how Glyphosate has made forest fires worse?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/glyphosate-spraying-w...
It changes the composition of the forests to make them more flammable.
[dead]
[flagged]
I think it depends. In developing countries, ecotourism even when poorly managed is better for conservation than uncontrolled fishing/farming.
Not in developing countries. Especially not when in the commons (e.g. territorial waters). Awareness + western tourism is often the only way these things get protected.
Hey there Mr. Jambo
What's the point in it existing then? Just for a couple of the chosen few?
I'm aware that lots of people can be destructive, but there's a balance.
For its own sake, not ours.
Beauty does not exist for its own sake, it only exists in the mind of someone else.
Shut up about the exact location, but do tell us about it. Just make it hard enough so the ignorant tourism industry cannot find it.
That's wild
Chemical sunscreen famously kills coral.
Some dermatologists have noted that sunscreen is little used in Africa. [1]
I’m not saying that is the only explanation for the reef’s preservation, but it’s likely a significant contributing factor.
[1] https://theconversation.com/sunscreen-wouldnt-have-saved-bob...
That and being 175 feet below the surface. You’re not getting “sunscreen” on mesophotic coral.
The evidence for sunscreen killing coral is pretty thin and the evidence that so-called mineral sunscreen _not_ killing coral is non-existent.
The mineral sunscreen comes off way more easily in water. For that reason, so did a few layers of my skin in the Bahamas.
i have a zinc/beeswax sunscreen, the thing is damn near impossible to get off, definitely WAY more water resistant than normal so called waterproof sunscreen