Staghorn Coral

Staghorn coral is an animal — one animal made of thousands: identical polyps growing together into antlered branches.Source 1

It runs on a partnership: photosynthetic algae live inside its cells and feed it by day, while tentacled polyps snatch plankton.Source 1

Healthy, it grows up to eight inches of new branch a year, and its thickets are habitat for reef fish.Source 1

These corals built the Caribbean's reefs over the past five thousand years, and their thickets blunt storm waves before shorelines.Source 1

Then, beginning in the 1980s, white band disease erased 97 percent of it.Source 1

The remaining danger is heat: too-warm water makes coral expel its algae, bleaching white and starving.Source 2

But a broken branch is not an ending — fragments that reattach grow into whole new colonies.Source 1

Restoration runs on that fact: divers hang finger-sized fragments from underwater coral trees, and in six to nine months each is reef-ready.Source 3

Once a year, after the late-summer full moon, whole reefs spawn in synchrony — and outplanted staghorn at Molasses Reef became the first restored corals documented joining in.Source 1Source 4

To witness the staghorn is to count the reef itself as a creature that can be replanted.Source 5