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Coral Babies!
Let’s just cut to the chase: Wild coral babies are growing in Tela! And here’s the precious group shot of these snowflake-shaped darlings: For those of you who want to know more, last fall, during the coral spawning season, Tela Coral planted about 50 terracotta tiles on the reef to see if any baby corals…
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We Did It! With Your Help, a Coral Gene Bank is Underway!
Confronted with the urgency of facing corals during this year’s record heat, Tela Coral launched an emergency campaign to build a genetic bank to protect the unusually healthy coral in Tela, Honduras. And you responded! Thanks to generous gifts from around the world and in donations both large and as small as $5, Tela Coral…
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URGENT: We Need a Genetic Bank!
If you would have gone diving in the Caribbean forty years ago, you would have had to try very hard not to see a branching coral known as elkhorn, or Acropora palmata. One of the region’s most abundant species, its colonies formed jungles on the crests of nearly all Caribbean reefs. From the side, it…
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A Tragedy, a Mystery, and an Opportunity
Last June, I received a note from the co-administrator of Tela’s Marine Protected Area, Antal Borcsok, saying something horrible was happening to Tela’s reef. “The reef is dying,” he wrote. My heart collapsed because this reef, one so rare and beautiful and poorly understood, had seemed resilient to so much that we’ve thrown at reefs.…
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What’s Growing in Tela?
We don’t know! But we hope to find out. During the hottest months of the year, a few days after the full moon at an auspicious moment after the sun sets, coral release their gametes into the sea. While the exact timing is well-known to each and every coral species–their very existence depends on it…