I am sorry to be negative, but after living in a commercial fishing area for a while: I wish we would stop discovering reefs, as that just invites horrible things like drag net fleets into these areas. [0]
We are strip-mining the oceans' remaining bounty.
When I lived in that commercial fishing area, I learned about bycatch. That is a top-tier euphemism for destroying the entire ocean ecosystem/protein-provider, where sometimes only 3% of caught biomass makes it to any table.
Shrimp is by far the worst. Please stop eating shrimp. If you knew the truth, and respect efficiency, you would never eat wild shrimp again. [1]
I went from thinking that seafood was a good thing, to now mostly eating chicken. We are such morons with how we treat the seas. BTW, I love spearfishing. If that is how I got my seafood, then not only fun, but no waste/bycatch.
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.
davidinosauro 13 hours ago [-]
I'm just now reading _Ocean_ by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield, which includes many stories like this. Would recommend!
pcrh 8 hours ago [-]
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.
We'll put that link in the toptext as well. Thanks!
F7F7F7 1 days ago [-]
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.
lubujackson 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
For the coral lovers. There are multiple companies working on reef preservation. They are woefully under resourced. If you can help, please do.
xandrius 1 days ago [-]
You should give some names if you personally know them.
bix6 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bluebarbet 23 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
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.
tjwebbnorfolk 21 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
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.
foxglacier 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ljf 8 hours ago [-]
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
bix6 7 hours ago [-]
Lmao some people just don’t get it.
Geezus_42 19 hours ago [-]
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.
palata 13 hours ago [-]
> I like the current world better.
Think about that in the next years when you finally realise how screwed we are.
antonvs 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.”
bix6 7 hours ago [-]
Congratulations on your comprehensive research! I researched this prior and found sources for all my numbers. What’s your counterclaim if not $10T?
Aboutplants 1 days ago [-]
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.
lukan 23 hours ago [-]
"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.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
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.
markdown 12 hours ago [-]
Don't they just sprout in deeper (cooler) water?
bix6 7 hours ago [-]
Only the deep water corals. The photosynthesizing type that most people are familiar with need light.
phkahler 1 days ago [-]
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 ;-)
bix6 1 days ago [-]
One major issue though is diversity. Many coral gardeners use fragments to clone one type over and over.
nothercastle 20 hours ago [-]
Also pests aquariums have some of the toughest pests imaginable
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
Algae is prolific!
bryanrasmussen 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 24 hours ago [-]
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.
parineum 18 hours ago [-]
Homeostasis is unnatural.
spaaaaaaaaaaace 1 hours ago [-]
wow interesting
novia 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
wildfireday2 1 days ago [-]
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.
paulhebert 1 days ago [-]
Isn’t this whole article about how they’re doing so right now?
peter_stokes 1 days ago [-]
More details on the Deep Sea Camera System used here:
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.
soperj 23 hours ago [-]
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.
pests 20 hours ago [-]
> 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]
soperj 15 hours ago [-]
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.
BloodyIron 19 hours ago [-]
YAY!
yieldcrv 1 days ago [-]
reading all those easily solved frictions they encountered was sad
1 days ago [-]
Anoian 1 days ago [-]
The less people know, the better. These places are better left untouched by humanity.
aaron695 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
functionmouse 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 23 hours ago [-]
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.
functionmouse 23 hours ago [-]
I think you're right. Thanks.
tomhow 22 hours ago [-]
Thanks :)
mips_avatar 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
lemonberry 1 days ago [-]
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.
akk0 1 days ago [-]
Not having heard of this plant before, I was rather confused why people would leave so much footwear on this trail.
lemonberry 1 days ago [-]
Apologies, I assumed common knowledge when I shouldn't have. It's a lovely orchid that resembles a slipper.
Yeah, only publish stories about coral bleaching, animals going extinct, and forest fires. Censor any good news at all costs!
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
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.
askonomm 10 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure they meant it sarcastically …
aboardRat4 1 days ago [-]
Forest fires are natural.
Coral bleaching seems too actually be a sign of prosperity, not suffering.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
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.
aboardRat4 22 hours ago [-]
>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.
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.
aboardRat4 7 hours ago [-]
But... basically any human activity changes forest composition.
Only 30% of the forests are primeval, and those 30% are not in Europe.
Forests are not "natural" for thousands of years.
>There are other triggers besides heat.
The amount of studies (or corals and algae) seems to be insufficient. I clearly remember the alarmist wave of the 2016, which turned out to be, well, not entirely unjustified, but clearly exaggerated.
bix6 5 hours ago [-]
Did you read the article?
Yes so maybe you should fund a coral study so that you can then know the truth that anyone who looks at this stuff knows.
mythrwy 1 days ago [-]
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?
It changes the composition of the forests to make them more flammable.
mythrwy 6 hours ago [-]
That isn't science that is some activists opinion and the amount of forests actually sprayed with glyphosate is not the majority or even close yet we still have wild fires. The article linked is mostly nonsense with regards to wild fires, it may have some validity for the areas sprayed regarding biodiversity.
bix6 5 hours ago [-]
Alright boss, enjoy inhaling that glyphosate as the forests burn!
I guess ecologists aren’t scientists?
Wildland fire ecologist Bob Gray said leafy deciduous trees, like aspen, are more resilient to wildfires than softwood conifers like pine and spruce.
"Softwoods are highly resinous," he said.
"The foliage and bark is highly flammable. When you've got large contiguous areas of conifer forest, you can have large continuous forest fires."
mythrwy 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not a fan of Glyphosate but it's just not used enough in forests to be a primary factor in wildfires. Additionally, in the article you link, they are really reaching and again, this is just their activist opinion (chemicals bad! ok) and I don't see any actual studies on the topic.
Doesn't pass basic sniff test.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
I never said it was a primary but if you look at Canada they use it for logging and it has very clearly changed forest composition which is what these “activists” are pointing to.
Multiple ecologists agree on the difference in flame resistance between tree types.
I am saying glyphosate impacts fires and you are saying it doesn’t. The evidence shows that it does impact even if small. That is my point. When the scientific study that no one is going to fund comes out in 10 years showing this, it’ll be too late.
This passes a basic sniff test if you use your brain to think through the chain of events.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
stasomatic 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Eueudhsbsj32 1 days ago [-]
I think it depends. In developing countries, ecotourism even when poorly managed is better for conservation than uncontrolled fishing/farming.
peter_stokes 1 days ago [-]
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.
asdfman123 1 days ago [-]
Hey there Mr. Jambo
ars 1 days ago [-]
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.
functionmouse 22 hours ago [-]
For its own sake, not ours.
ars 19 hours ago [-]
Beauty does not exist for its own sake, it only exists in the mind of someone else.
1970-01-01 1 days ago [-]
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.
danteocualesjr 1 days ago [-]
That's wild
nothinggoesaway 1 days ago [-]
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.
That and being 175 feet below the surface. You’re not getting “sunscreen” on mesophotic coral.
parineum 18 hours ago [-]
The evidence for sunscreen killing coral is pretty thin and the evidence that so-called mineral sunscreen _not_ killing coral is non-existent.
frollogaston 17 hours ago [-]
The mineral sunscreen comes off way more easily in water. For that reason, so did a few layers of my skin in the Bahamas.
redeeman 11 hours ago [-]
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
Rendered at 20:41:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
We are strip-mining the oceans' remaining bounty.
When I lived in that commercial fishing area, I learned about bycatch. That is a top-tier euphemism for destroying the entire ocean ecosystem/protein-provider, where sometimes only 3% of caught biomass makes it to any table.
Shrimp is by far the worst. Please stop eating shrimp. If you knew the truth, and respect efficiency, you would never eat wild shrimp again. [1]
I went from thinking that seafood was a good thing, to now mostly eating chicken. We are such morons with how we treat the seas. BTW, I love spearfishing. If that is how I got my seafood, then not only fun, but no waste/bycatch.
[0] https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/
[1] https://www.fao.org/4/w6602e/w6602E09.htm
[1] https://www.biographic.com/the-corals-that-shouldnt-exist/
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.
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.
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.
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 appreciate it. It’s an uphill battle but it’s worth it.
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
Think about that in the next years when you finally realise how screwed we are.
Chatgpt’s assessment of this claim: “not well supported by the mainstream literature and is likely misleading.”
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.
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.
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.
https://www.dev.nationalgeographic.org/society/our-programs/...
https://github.com/NGS-Exploration-Technology/Deep-Sea-Camer...
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/florida-dumped-h...
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-subway-cars-turning...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a link from the USDA Forest Service:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/cyprip...
try botany:
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA
Coral bleaching seems too actually be a sign of prosperity, not suffering.
Bleaching happens when the symbiosis breaks down due to elevated temps. That is due to suffering and causes suffering.
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.
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.
Only 30% of the forests are primeval, and those 30% are not in Europe.
Forests are not "natural" for thousands of years.
>There are other triggers besides heat.
The amount of studies (or corals and algae) seems to be insufficient. I clearly remember the alarmist wave of the 2016, which turned out to be, well, not entirely unjustified, but clearly exaggerated.
Yes so maybe you should fund a coral study so that you can then know the truth that anyone who looks at this stuff knows.
It changes the composition of the forests to make them more flammable.
I guess ecologists aren’t scientists?
Wildland fire ecologist Bob Gray said leafy deciduous trees, like aspen, are more resilient to wildfires than softwood conifers like pine and spruce.
"Softwoods are highly resinous," he said.
"The foliage and bark is highly flammable. When you've got large contiguous areas of conifer forest, you can have large continuous forest fires."
Doesn't pass basic sniff test.
Multiple ecologists agree on the difference in flame resistance between tree types.
I am saying glyphosate impacts fires and you are saying it doesn’t. The evidence shows that it does impact even if small. That is my point. When the scientific study that no one is going to fund comes out in 10 years showing this, it’ll be too late.
This passes a basic sniff test if you use your brain to think through the chain of events.
I'm aware that lots of people can be destructive, but there's a balance.
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...