AAAS: "Coral can heal rapidly from bleaching—if it touches a clone," by Warren Cornwall.

"When coral bleaches during a heat wave + ejects its symbiotic algae, it usually means either a death sentence or a slow recovery over months or years." Some corals have a reproductive strategy that involves passing symbionts from parent to offspring, which might make that species more responsive to a direct 'transfusion' method than others, but in most species, young corals capture algae from the surrounding water.

However, a serendipitous discovery led to a 'deceptively simple' approach reported in a 2 October paper in Environmental Microbiology Reports + another published more recently in Science Advances. "By touching a piece of bleached coral to a healthy piece, a kind of algal transfusion can occur...symbionts flow through a bridge of tissue + then rapidly reproduce, repopulating the bleached piece in as little as 4 weeks." 

But the method didn’t work when the healthy coral came from a genetically different colony. In those situations, the coral polyps sent out tiny stinging appendages as if attacking an intruder, comparable to our immune system rejecting an organ transplant from a stranger. 

"When corals from the same colony were physically touching, tissue from polyps in the two chunks merged to create a kind of algal highway." If the bits stayed in contact for a week, symbionts poured in + began to replicate, doubling approximately every 4 days, as much as 10 times faster than what has been witnessed on bleached reefs, which normally recover by reabsorbing free-floating algae.

Researcher Bede Johnston, a coral researcher at the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, also addressed the puzzle of heat tolerance in 2 species of coral, Galaxea fascicularis + Psammocora columna. "They let polyps in some of the fragments absorb lab-raised symbionts bred for tolerance to extreme temperatures...when the inoculated fragments were joined to bleached fragments, some of the heat-tolerant symbionts found their way into the neighboring polyps."

Despite the practical challenges of inoculating thousands of square km of coral reef, I love seeing this steady advance in marine science.

Found this unknown species by Marco Island, FL. This could potentially be in the Pycnogonida class and the best feed back I’ve received so far is it being potentially a species of sea spider; however, the paddle shaped ends of each leg is mainly what is throwing everyone off. Any thoughts?

This is from one of my favourite octopus encounters to date.

This Giant Pacific Octopus was out hunting, checking every rock and crack for something to eat. Eventually, it reached into a crack already occupied by another local giant.

At first, the interaction seemed like an investigation. Was there a big snack hiding in there? But things quickly took a turn, teaching our octopus buddy that not all fish are friends.

mullen_dives

A single bumphead parrotfish creates approximately 200lbs of sand every year. There are 120 (thereabouts) in this school at Sipadan which create about 24000lbs of sand a year! about the same weight as a school bus or three African Elephants. There's a link to a longer video in the comments. Thank you for the beaches bumpheads.

Hi all, I’m a solo developer (not a marine biologist, which is exactly why I need your eyes on this).

I’ve spent about a year and a half building EcoAquatic (ecoaquatic.org), a non-commercial, open tool for tracking fish species and aquatic life in South African waters, no cost, nothing for sale, just something I made. It pulls real data: the GBIF taxonomic backbone (3,000+ species with confirmed SA occurrences), live IUCN Red List conservation status, and FishBase/SASSI info, shown on an interactive map alongside marine protected area boundaries. You can log a sighting with a GPS location, and citizen-scientist sightings go through a moderation step before entering the dataset.

What I can’t judge from the dev side is whether it actually reflects how people who know the field would record and use observations. So I’m asking the people who’d know:

* Does the sighting workflow capture the fields you’d actually need (habitat, depth, confidence, etc.)?

* Is anything scientifically off, oversimplified, or misleading?

* What’s missing that you’d expect to be there?

Have a look here: [https://ecoaquatic.org\](https://ecoaquatic.org) (heads up, it needs a quick free account to get in 30-second sign-up, nothing commercial).

It’s an early build and rough in places, and critical feedback is the most useful kind. Comments here are ideal. If anyone would rather give more structured feedback there’s a short form, which I’m happy to share with anyone who wants it.

Thanks for reading.

Whale in ocean

Amazing mother nature, how long the tail is to decoys doston kundari