nature
Dying corals fully recovered in seven weeks by touching
Two fragments tipped over in a tank. One was dying. It stopped.
Bleached corals on the brink of death fully recovered in seven weeks at a Stanford University lab, the fastest documented recovery on record. The method, published in Science Advances, is almost embarrassingly simple. You put a dying coral next to a healthy clone and let them touch. Where they made contact, color returned, signaling that beneficial algae had flowed back in. The discovery started by accident. In 2025, Professor Steve Palumbi noticed two fragments from the same colony had tipped over in a tank and were now leaning against each other. Lead author Danny Collins, a PhD student at the Doerr School of Sustainability, tested it properly by arranging pairs millimeters apart. The touching ones recovered. The others died. Once inside, the algae doubled every four days, about ten times the rate seen in wild corals. Bleached corals are often written off as a lost cause. Collins puts it plainly. They are not dead yet.
