What Corals Know That We Keep Forgetting

by David Ojok, CRC Communications

Corals know things.

Not in the way humans hoard knowledge inside books or conferences, but in the way the ocean holds a memory. Quietly. Patiently. Long enough to outlive our panic cycles and policy seasons.

Every time I read another bleaching alert or field update from a restoration practitioner, I’m reminded that corals aren’t just organisms. They’re philosophers with exoskeletons.

They know how to share long before we invented the word “collaboration.”

A coral colony doesn’t waste time debating resource distribution. They pass nutrients across a whole neighborhood because the success of one polyp means nothing without the others. Meanwhile, humans are still in committee meetings arguing over who gets the next grant.

Corals know how to endure stress with a strange kind of dignity.

When temperatures spike, they don’t write resignation letters or issue blame statements. They signal, they shift, they survive; sometimes barely, sometimes brilliantly, but always with a clarity that says: prepare, adapt, respond. It’s funny how the smallest animals on Earth have mastered climate resilience better than the species that caused the problem.

Corals understand cooperation at a level we still treat as optional.

A reef is the world’s most chaotic team project, and yet everything works: the fish, the microbes, the algae, the architects, the cleaners, the predators. It’s messy, yes, but functioning. Compare that to how long it takes us to decide on the date of a Zoom meeting.

And corals know time.

They grow millimeter by millimeter, year by year, centuries in the making. They remind us that restoration isn’t an overnight miracle, it’s a slow, stubborn promise. A promise practitioners keep every time they fix a nursery line, gather data at sunrise, or send the CRC updates from the field that read like love letters to ecosystems refusing to quit.

What corals know, and we keep forgetting, is that survival is a collective act.

Climate advocates know this. Scientists know this. Coastal communities know this. At the Coral Restoration Consortium, I see it every day: people scattered across oceans, speaking different languages, working inside different constraints, all moving like a reef, together.

Maybe that’s the real lesson corals keep whispering beneath the waves.

Not “save us.”

But “remember us.”

Remember how to share.

Remember how to adapt.

Remember how to stay with each other even when conditions get rough.

Restoration is not just rebuilding what’s broken.

It’s relearning what corals have been teaching for millions of years:We endure best when we endure together.