"After sick corals were placed in direct contact with healthy ones of the same genetic make-up, they recovered at “incredible” speed, scientists found."
"Danny Collins looked into his microscope and could scarcely believe his eyes: A piece of healthy coral was healing a sick one just by touching it.
These were tiny coral nubbins, not a whole colony. And they were in a lab in California, not on an actual reef. Still, the transformation was striking: The ghostly, heat-shocked coral was regaining its color in a matter of weeks, not the months it might take in the wild.
“Wow, not only is this happening,” Mr. Collins, a doctoral student in ocean science at Stanford University, remembers thinking. “It is happening at an incredible rate.”
His and his colleagues’ discoveries, in that experiment and the ones that followed, point to intriguing new possibilities for treating reefs that are devastated by marine heat waves, which are becoming more frequent because of climate change."
Raymond Zhong reports for the New York Times October 14, 2026.
