One Man's Fight to Save the Coral

One-quarter of the world's coral has vanished in the last 25 years. Another quarter will be lost in the next 25 years, destroyed by global warming, overfishing and environmental destruction. Some conservationists say coral is doomed -- but they haven't reckoned with an aquarium supply salesman armed with epoxy, patience and a love of the Florida Keys:

“I didn’t know what it was at first,” he said. “I saw five of these little things. I kept watching them and pretty soon they started to grow out into staghorn coral.” He set the rocks aside, underwater, and managed to keep the coral growing in spite of storms and other problems. When he found broken pieces of coral he stuck them in other pieces of rock, and “sometimes they would live.” [...]

For a brief heady moment, he recalled, he thought about the fact that he has government permission to sell coral and considered turning it into a lucrative sideline for his business. But then, he said, he started thinking about what had happened to the Keys’ reefs since he first encountered them in the 1970s, “when there would be thickets three, four, five feet high and just vast.”

Those kinds of underwater landscapes have just about vanished, he said. “So I thought, well, these corals are in trouble. And we can make a difference rather than make money.” Today he has several nurseries, each with a variety of coral strains, at varying depth, water quality and distance from shore. The goal of the project is to identify which coral strains are most robust and in what conditions.

Coral Is Dying. Can It Be Reborn? [New York Times]

Image: Richard Ling