The pineapple corals are STILL at it y& #39;all. We discovered when they spawn, but now we can& #39;t figure out when they stop.

This past week, we closed the gap from night -4 to +4 relative to the full moon, leaving 0.0 weeks to just go home and eat dinner. Last night& #39;s nonsense:

Scientists used to assume corals were mostly brooders, because sometimes after collecting a colony, it burped out a bunch of larvae into a bucket. Then they assumed corals were mostly spawners, because a bunch of colonies spawned gamete bundles all on the same night...

Then everyone got a litttttle bit too comfy, because you could either put a coral in a bucket, or go dive for four nights, and yay there& #39;s your field season.

What got neglected was all the weird ones, gonochores, rare corals, deep corals.

By focusing on the easy workhorse species, we made a misleading mental cartoon of What Corals Do.

They brood! Or they mass spawn! The end!

They only & #39;do& #39; those two things because we only gave them those two opportunities.

But a lot of corals are & #39;spawning& #39; 6 or 20 or 100 nights in a row... and filter feeding sperm? storing sperm? releasing fertilized embryos? surface brooding? switching sexes? skipping sperm altogether? That& #39;s where it gets interesting. That& #39;s the fun of natural history.

It& #39;s cool that some of this was mine to discover. Knowing you& #39;re the first in your generation to see something underwater is REALLY FUN.

But mostly I wish we spent the past decades doing way more natural history and way less coral torture science. We& #39;d be so much further ahead.