What reef recovery actually looks like

Coral gardening — growing fragments on nursery frames and transplanting them — is now offered as a guest activity at resorts from the Maldives to the Mesoamerican reef. The technique is real and the results are highly variable.

The core issue is that transplanting works only where the underlying stressor has eased. Planting nursery coral into water that will bleach again next summer produces a photograph, not a reef.

The projects with defensible outcomes share three features: they select for heat-tolerant genotypes rather than fast-growing ones, they monitor survival for years rather than months, and they publish those survival figures whether or not the numbers flatter them.

Ask an operator for their three-year survival rate. A good project will give you a percentage and a caveat. A weak one will tell you how many fragments were planted, which is an input, not a result.

None of this means the activity is pointless. Reef tourism revenue funds a substantial share of marine protection in several countries, and guests who have spent an hour underwater with a project tend to become the constituency that argues for it later.