The Man with 12 Brains

The Chagos brain coral,  Ctenella chagius , is ostensibly the world’s rarest coral. A once common denizen of the shallow reefs around the Chagos Archipelago, recent decades have seen populations of this iconic species crash to the very brink of extinction. The only member of its genus and endemic to this utterly remote island chain, it was thought to be lost until its rediscovery in 2019, and the chance finding of possibly the last cluster of the species in existence, with over a hundred healthy colonies surviving in a small lagoon on the shores of a tiny uninhabited island at the  western edge of the Great Chagos Bank. Early predictions for the ongoing and likely historic El Niño foreshadowed the potential loss of Ctenella entirely, and so in the Summer of 2023, a team of biologists, aquarists and a stuntman was assembled to affect a precipitous Species Recovery Plan for the coral. This is the tale of that extraordinary expedition on the High Seas, and its unexpected follow-up earlier this year – an unlikely conservation success story for our times.
Dr. Bry Wilson was (up until very recently) a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and a member of the Bertarelli Foundation’s Marine Science Program. His dream is to become more urchin than man, by the hapless collection of – and embedding within his mortal form – spines from every reef system in the world. He is currently 2.3% urchin and seven reefs (and one kelp forest) closer to realising that dream.