I’ve always been curious as to the level of success these programs achieve compared to just letting nature respond on its own. There are many cases where “dead” areas come back to life with abundance and give me pause as to whether we should for the most part just get out of natures way.

Here’s one successful example that only worked because of human intervention: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308123248.h...

They can only survive short duration events. At some point the temp and time is too much and they die. The only way they come back is reintroduction.

We’ve lost over 50% of the reefs and are expected to lose 90% by 2050.

There are many amazing solutions. Some use corals more resistant to heat stress. Australia has seen some promising results with seed boxes. I know of a few other amazing solutions currently in the lab.

We have already gotten in natures way. So now we need to help nature with our technology.

I recall reading that the corals can reproduce both sexually and by cloning, with most in nature using cloning. The researchers brought them back to a lab and bred a bunch of them and found a lot of offspring could thrive in the warmer more acidic water, so they wanted to reintroduce them to a reef (or maybe they had). Been a while but it was interesting. Not sure what it takes to shift away from cloning in nature, but waiting for most the reef to die off seems backwards ;-)