在深海种植珊瑚：用新技术修复水下荒漠
Most people picture coral reefs as sunlit, turquoise wonderlands. But the vast majority of coral species actually live in cold, dark waters hundreds of metres below the surface. These deep-sea corals form slow-growing forests that shelter fish, crabs and countless other creatures. Yet bottom trawling and climate change are carving ghostly wastelands out of these hidden gardens.
Off the coast of Hawaii, a team of marine biologists is trying something unusual: farming deep-sea corals in the lab and replanting them on the seabed. They collect fragments of wild corals from a depth of about 400 metres, then place them inside special flow-through tanks that mimic the pressure, temperature and currents of the abyss. Here the corals grow two to three times faster than in nature, nourished by carefully dosed nutrients.
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