A healthy neighbour brings bleached coral back to life in seven weeks

A bleached coral looks like a skeleton — but Danny Collins and Steve Palumbi at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability have shown it is not always a death sentence. In their study, published in Science Advances, bleached fragments placed touching healthy clones of themselves fully recovered within seven weeks, while fragments kept apart died. The helpful algae that feed corals moved across within three days, then doubled every four days — about ten times faster than in wild corals. Even five days to a week of contact was enough. The team is careful: reefs cannot all be paired with healthy twins, but delivering banked algae in batches could one day speed restoration where it matters most.

SDG 14 · Life below water — Mechanism: tech innovation