The warm blue waters of the Solomon Islands, an island chain in the South Pacific Ocean, contain one of the world’s largest marine fauna.
Roughly the size of two basketball courts, it’s neither a whale nor a giant squid.
It is a single piece of coral.
On Wednesday, a team of researchers and filmmakers exploring the Solomon Islands revealed what they claim is the world’s largest private coral colony. Coral, a communal organism made up of millions of creatures called polyps, is 34 meters wide and 32 meters long — and so big it can be seen from space. A typical coral reef is made up of many different coral colonies, most of which are genetically distinct, with only one individual.
In new photos shared by the research team, the coral, a species known as Pavona clavus, looks like a lumpy brown mound covered in lumps. Closer views reveal bits of yellow, green and purple. Considering its size and the slow rate at which corals grow, this individual is probably several centuries old.
“It’s a dream to see something so unique,” Manu San Felix, an underwater photographer and marine biologist who saw the coral for the first time in the Solomon Islands last month, told Vox. “When Napoleon was alive, this thing was here.”
San Felix discovered the coral while filming near an island called Malaulalo for an ongoing National Geographic expedition. The expedition, in collaboration with the Solomon Islands government, is part of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, which aims to help countries establish more marine parks by documenting marine life. According to Dennis Marita, a member of the Ulwa P’onapaina tribe, Malaullo is mostly uninhabited and its waters largely unexplored. The tribe oversees the maritime region of Malaullo.
“This is something huge for our community,” Marita, who is the director of culture at the Solomon Islands Ministry of Culture and Tourism, told a news conference on Tuesday.
No other coral in the public record is larger than this, although it is possible that there are larger colonies in remote areas of the ocean that have yet to be discovered. D previous record holder The world’s largest coral was a colony in American Samoa that was about 22 meters wide.
“Many of the world’s coral reefs are remote and not well explored,” Stacey Jupiter, executive director of marine conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who was not involved in the expedition, told Vox. People just surveyed About 5 percent Of the planet’s marine kingdom, he noted. “So it’s not at all surprising that we keep making new discoveries, even of large animals,” Jupiter said.
“Lighthouse of Hope”
The discovery comes at a time when coral reefs around the world are disappearing.
Climate change is warming the oceans and warmer water is killing corals. Corals get their color and most of their food from symbiotic algae that live inside the polyps. When the ocean water gets too warm, that algae disappears and the coral turns white – or “bleached.” Bleached corals are essentially starving to death.
Coral reefs are encountered worldwide The most widespread bleaching crisis on record. Three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs have experienced enough ocean warming to cause bleaching by early 2023, According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many corals have died.
Meanwhile, new research suggests that More than 40 percent Hardy corals that build reefs—like colonies recently discovered in the Solomon Islands—are at risk of extinction.
It’s a problem, make light of it. Reefs dampen waves that hit the coast during hurricanes, they are home to a significant portion of the commercial fish that people eat, and they are the engine of the tourism economy in many coastal areas. Billions of people depend on coral reefs.
Perhaps surprisingly, the National Geographic team discovered a lot of dead coral in the shallows off the Solomon Islands, likely due to excessive ocean heat, said Molly Timmers, a marine ecologist and the expedition’s lead scientist. That was discouraging, he said.
In the face of that loss, the discovery was “a glimmer of hope,” Timmers told Vox. “It’s like, holy crap! It’s amazing!”
Large coral colonies provide homes for marine critters such as crabs, snails and small fish. More importantly, they seed the ocean with baby corals as they grow, or reproduce, helping to restore damaged areas of the reef.
Also, this particular coral can be resilient to stress, including extreme ocean heat. The research team estimates that it is between 300 and 500 years old, meaning it has lived through and survived multiple global bleaching events. Unlike some corals closer to shore, this individual – which was more than 10 meters deep – appeared healthy, perhaps because it was in deep, cold water or because it has some built-in genetic tolerance for heat. So the span it creates can also be elastic.
“Anything old is really good for survival,” says Maria Begar, a marine ecologist at the University of Leeds.
Discovering a large colony of coral isn’t all that impressive in itself, Beger said. To support marine life and combat threats such as climate change, it is more important that reefs contain a variety of coral species of all shapes and sizes, rather than one large species.
“At the same time, if a report like this gets people excited about coral reefs,” he said, “maybe that’s a good thing.”
Marita of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism told Vox that the discovery could help the Solomon Islands conserve their water more effectively. Although his tribe has been informally conserving Malaulalo on its own for a decade, he said, the island would benefit from an official marine protected area recognized by the Solomon Islands government. Marita is campaigning to make that happen.
“It will definitely boost the conservation initiatives that we’re working on,” he told Vox, referring to the discovery. “This mega coral will help bring much-needed visibility and recognition from the government and other stakeholders. It’s really a win for us.”
