On any given day, in shops around the world and online, customers can pay as little as a few dozen dollars to buy living corals for their aquariums. While some of these coveted, brightly colored pieces of coral are sourced from farms, others come directly from ecosystems that are dying, such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Reefs have endured intolerable conditions for decades now due to global warming. Since February 2023 over three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs have endured heat stress in an ongoing global mass bleaching event, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told Reuters last October. Scientists from NOAA and the International Coral Reef Initiative declare these events when significant bleaching happens in all ocean basins where warm-water corals can be found. The current global mass bleaching event is the largest one on record.
“Every place I know is dying at different paces,” says Tom Goreau, president of the nonprofit Global Coral Reef Alliance. “We’re looking at the last survivors almost everywhere.”
Yet the commercial trade in live corals from the Great Barrier Reef continues — as it does from other reefs around the world — and in fact has increased dramatically over the past 20 years.
Remarkably, trade endures even during catastrophic bleaching events. The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst bleaching event on record in 2024 as temperatures in the Coral Sea hit a 400-year high. Despite this historic event Fisheries Queensland — the agency that manages fishing activities there — neither temporarily closed its commercial coral fishery nor imposed emergency restrictions on extraction.
For Goreau the continued trade in corals at this juncture begs a question: “Should we be exploiting an ecosystem that’s going extinct in front of our eyes?”
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Image via Acropora / Wikimedia, cropped to 1020×630, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
