There is a sound the ocean makes when it heals. It is not loud. It is the quiet percussion of polyps building reef in water that has cooled by half a degree. It is the creak and flutter of a sea fan finding its footing on rock that was once bleached white as bone. For eleven years, the Coral Restoration Foundation seeded fragments of elkhorn coral — once functionally extinct in the Florida Keys — onto underwater nursery trees. Tens of thousands of fragments. Each one a clone of something older
