The Summer I Saw Titans
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This summer, the Seabirds team went on an expedition to Tela, Honduras, to study the spawning of the local reefs, including the terribly underrated Playa Cocalito. Between the hours of travel, study, and data collection, the thing that struck me most was the sheer scale of the reef. It was immaculate and awe inspiring, but above all… it was nostalgic.
I grew up with coral reefs as a part of my backyard, my ecosystem. My family owned a watersports on the small Caribbean island of St. Maarten and our local beach was a 5 minute walk from my house. Seeing fields of elkhorn and brain coral were my normal baseline, and watching it wither away to extinction has been one of the greatest sources of heartbreak in my life. Imagine growing up next to a forest, and every time you looked back it died apocalyptically fast, until (and I cannot stress enough how quickly this happened) suddenly it was just a field of dead logs.
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Tiffany Duong/Ocean Rebels
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Tiffany Duong/Ocean Rebels
“But there’s still fish when I go snorkeling!” Yeah, but they’re basically homeless without the swaths of branching corals. Large branching corals like staghorn and elkhorn are the reef, they are the building blocks. Without these species, the fauna have nowhere to breed, rest, and hide. The overexposure is a death sentence to the entire ecosystem. Corals are animals too. They spawn, they eat, they keep themselves safe from predators, they just can’t move. Which means they can’t escape unhealthy conditions. It makes the reefs off of Tela feel all the more impossible.
Seeing the thriving fields in Playa Cocalito (AKA the Rebel Reef) was like seeing a herd of white rhinos grazing. I bawled my eyes out. This was a giant, living animal that I haven’t seen so healthy since I was a child. This was the world we could’ve had! The world we did have until I was a teenager. We’ve overused the planet so much that I had given up hope that areas like Playa Cocalito could ever exist. I was thankfully proven wrong, but we can’t expect it to stay strong forever.
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Tiffany Duong/Ocean Rebels
The thing that’s hardest to impart on people who don’t share my experiences is the scale of what reefs should be. Historically, ships of all sizes would crash and wreck because of the sheer volume of branching corals that used to line the Florida reef tract. Imagine a living breathing wall, hundreds of miles long and hundreds of feet wide daring anyone to step over it. Coral reefs are titans living among us, and we’re watching them die. Not all at once, but just slow enough that people can make excuses for why it doesn’t matter and why they shouldn’t care.
But I care. And the Seabirds care. So do the conservationists of Tela, and Florida, and the Caribbean, and Australia, and everywhere else that has ever had the privilege to have coral grow off their coast. So I’ll keep caring, and I’ll keep screaming from rooftops that you should care, and hopefully, one day, we do a good enough job that the next generation won’t see them as white rhinos, but as another familiar part of their backyard ecosystem.
Relevant Expedition Information:
- Date: 2026 July 28 - Aug 2
- Name: Spawning Adzenture
- Location: Tela, Honduras
- Partner(s): Tela Coral, Adzentures
- Vessel: various, run by Tela Marine
