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 might find their way there. This was an interesting and important question because on other Caribbean reefs, there are so few coral they are evolutionary “zombies,” living but not reproducing. (Details of that work are in this blog.)

In April, we returned with a stereomicroscope, video camera attachment, and a fluorescent light in our luggage. We are so grateful for the generous donation that allowed us to buy this microscope.

On this trip, we were thrilled to partner with Families in Nature, which meant that we had a wonderful group of students, their parents, and their grandparents doing science with us and they were just as excited as we were about Tela and what we might learn from the Rebel Reef as we are.

Our hotel room turned into a kind of mini-lab with the microscope set up on the desk and students and parents watching and helping us record our findings as we scanned the tiles on the computer monitor. One of them is checking out a tile under fluorescent lighting the shot below. We also want to give a huge shout out to marine toxicologist Beatrix Hoecker for being a true ace on the scope and great guide to the incredible microscopic world on the reef.

The settlement tiles held a rich a realm of creatures that were astonishing and stunning. The diversity of invertebrate life in the sea, the dozens of phyla that only exist there and not on land is awesome and mind-blowing. We saw polychaete worms, nermertean worms, isopods, amphipods, bryozoans, tunicates, sponges, brittle stars, mussels and more. The tiles provided an absolute kaleidoscope of biological diversity. Here’s a small sampling.

But best of all, we also found a coral nursery. We pulled up fifteen tiles in three different stations in the middle of the bay, and we found baby corals at each station. You can bet there was cheering in our hotel room/marine science lab each time we found a snowflake-shaped-skeleton snuggled into its terracotta crib. We aren’t yet sure what species they are but they appear to be at least three different ones. We are working on identifications and will post an update when we can. We also replaced the tiles we pulled up so that we can capture coral recruits for the entire spawning season this summer.

But the big thing that these coral babies show us is that evolution–and all its biological creativity–is still happening in Tela. That means there’s a lot of potential for Tela to matter for reefs throughout the Caribbean. Stay tuned for more, because more is definitely growing in Tela!