Over the years, Cody Clements, a marine ecologist at Georgia Tech, has planted over 10,000 coral fragments across the South Pacific.
“You can just break off a branch from a coral, plant it into the sandy bottom, and it will grow into a whole new coral,” explains Clements. “I have corals out there that I’ve planted and they were the size of my pinky — and now they’re the size of a basketball.”
As he was gearing up for an experiment in 2018 in French Polynesia off the island of Mo’orea, something caught his attention. It had to do with sea cucumbers — marine invertebrates that are distantly related to starfish but resemble soft pickles.
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