2015 shattered temperature records worldwide. This year’s El Niño has been making headlines in the coral reef community since early this summer, as record-high temperatures hit coral reefs more severely than scientists have ever seen before. Yet even knowing these facts, I was not prepared for the devastation I saw at home in Hawaii over winter break.
![Photo by Zoe Sims A healthy coral colony sample from a bleaching study that took place in Bermuda last summer. The tiny flower-like circles are polyps - each one is a coral individual, which together comprise the colony. The yellow color is from this coral's symbiotic zooxanthellae, not the coral itself.](https://pcur.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/238/2016/01/coralsquare-300x300.png)
The population of Pocillopora meandrina, the cauliflower coral that once dotted the coastline of Kailua-Kona, my hometown, has been decimated. The reef is left with the feel of an evacuated city: the coral heads are like abandoned buildings, their skeletons lifeless and vacant. Lacking the organisms that sustained them, they slowly begin to crumble.
Continue reading Elegy and ode: Finding life on a bleached reef