One of our goals at Tela Coral is to share the story of the incredible coral that exist in Tela Bay. So, when our co-founder Tiffany Duong, who is a member of the prestigious Explorers Club, was approached to have Tela’s story included in a book they were spearheading called Letters from the Edge, she raised her hand and said, “We have a story to tell.”
This conceit of Letters from the Edge is to tell the stories of curiosity, bravery, and discovery from explorers from around the world through first-person letters. The idea is that by understanding our edges, we better understand ourselves. In this electronic age, those letters could come in the form of texts, emails, or others form of communication from place to distant place.
We decided to tell the powerful story behind the text message chain between our Honduran partner Antal Borcsok and me, when Tela’s reef experienced a still-unexplained mass mortality in 2023. A swath of reef suddenly died in just a few days, making it unlikely that it was bleaching or disease. We have a few hypotheses about what caused the mass mortality, but haven’t been able to solve the mystery. This event is also related by our Honduran colleague Christian Carias in our award-winning film The Rebel Reef as well as in our blog as we tried to reckon with what it meant.
In the moment just after Antal discovered the mass mortality, you can read the raw pain in his words. It’s three years later, and the pain of that moment still hits hard. The book’s author, Jeff Wiser, interviewed Tiff, me, and our third co-founder Heather Kuhlken about our responses, each of which is colored by our personalities, individualities, and personal experiences.
The title Jeff gave the chapter, Half Dead or Half Alive?, comes from the paired reactions of Heather and Tiffany, who struggle with the tension between half of the reef that remained alive and vibrant amidst the painful tragedy of the other half.
We knew it then, but the ultimate lesson from this event is that we don’t have time to wait. You can’t predict the future in a place as variable and vast as the sea, especially as climatic changes exacerbate extreme environmental conditions. And so we need to keep doing everything we can to protect Tela’s unusually resilient corals as fast as we can. This is the urgency behind our drive to build the first genetic biobank and marine biology lab for the corals on the Honduran mainland.
Some good news is that we are already seeing signs of recovery on much of the swath of reef killed in that strange event. We see baby corals growing on top of the skeletons of their ancestors. We can even see some corals that seem to have died, were actually just in a kind of hibernation, and now their tissues have recolonized their skeletons. And of course, the giant of the region, massive Casita, a mountainous star coral that is the size of a small shed, remains alive.
We are grateful to The Explorers Club that they chose this important story, one of pain and perseverance, and that. it will forever have a place between the covers of this beautiful book.
If you want to read the full story, as well as many other inspirational tales from around the world, you can find Letters from the Edge wherever books are sold!
(And if you want to pair Letters from the Edge with a copy of Spineless or Life on the Rocks, I’ll personalize it if you make a donation to Tela Coral to support our efforts to protect these amazing animals!)