<p>The reef had been in decline for over a decade before the restoration project began. A sequence of bleaching events, compounded by agricultural runoff from the coast and damage from boat anchoring in shallow areas, had left significant sections of the outer reef in a state of functional collapse — the coral structure present, but dead, and the fish populations that depended on it thinned accordingly.</p><p>The project that emerged from conversations between a university marine biology department, a regional fisheries authority, and a network of local dive operators was shaped by a recognition that ecological intervention alone would not be sufficient. The reef existed within a working coastal economy. Any restoration effort that failed to bring the fishing and diving communities into genuine partnership would face resistance at best and active undermining at worst.</p><p>The scientific foundation of the project was coral gardening — a technique in which fragments of live coral are collected from healthier sections of reef, grown on underwater nursery frames until they reach viable transplant size, and then attached to degraded substrate where natural recruitment has stalled. The coral strains selected for propagation were identified through a screening process that tested for thermal tolerance, prioritizing specimens that had survived previous bleaching events with minimal stress response. It was painstaking work: hundreds of fragments, each monitored individually, with survival rates and growth data logged at every dive.</p><p>Local divemasters and fishing cooperative members were trained as reef monitors from the project's first year. This was not a token gesture toward inclusion. The monitoring network they formed covered far more of the reef, far more frequently, than a university team operating alone could have managed. Their observations fed directly into the project's data, and several anomalies they flagged — an unusual concentration of crown-of-thorns starfish in one section, a previously unrecorded patch of surviving staghorn coral in another — shaped decisions about where transplantation effort should be focused.</p><p>By the end of the third field season, survival rates for transplanted corals were running at 67 percent — above the project's target and toward the higher end of outcomes reported in comparable programs globally. Fish species counts in the restored sections were showing early signs of recovery, though the ecologists were careful to note that reef ecosystems recover slowly and that the monitoring would need to continue for years before firm conclusions could be drawn.</p><p>The education program that ran alongside the fieldwork reached over 800 school students through visits to the project's shore-based nursery facility, where fragments in land-based holding tanks could be observed before being transferred to the underwater frames. For many of the children who came through, it was their first direct encounter with the organisms whose fate is so often discussed in the abstract. That encounter is not measurable in the same way as coral survival rates. But the project team considered it among the most important outcomes of their three years' work.</p>