A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 species and a great deal of human well-being—but warming waters are an existential threat. And nowhere are reefs suffering more than in the Caribbean.
After last summer’s unprecedented heat wave, when water temperatures off the coast of Florida exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, coral populations there sank to just 1 percent of their historical abundances. As hard as conservationists have fought to protect corals, they are quickly running out of options.
But what if corals from elsewhere could thrive there?
This question burst into view earlier this year when coral geneticist Mikhail Matz proposed translocating corals from the Pacific Ocean into the Caribbean, setting off a conversation that reverberated far beyond the biology conference where he gave his talk. The idea was picked up by Nature; the BBC called. Matz’s post on X (formerly known as Twitter) about the idea garnered thousands of views.
