Close your eyes and picture a confetti-storm of color below the Indian Ocean’s surface—orange sea fans, violet brain coral, and neon-green anemones swaying like party streamers. Now open them to reality: Somalia’s reefs really do look like that, tucked along a coastline that runs about 3,333 km—the longest stretch on mainland Africa.

Most outsiders assume decades of civil war plus illegal fishing must have obliterated the reefs. Surprise: limited heavy industry and very little bombing at sea left large swaths of coral almost pristine. Regional surveys list at least 63 coral species across 27 genera, a respectable tally for the western Indian Ocean.

One headline find is an as-yet-unnamed pillar-coral relative—informally dubbed the “Somali pillar coral” by the research team that first photographed it near Marka in 2019. Genetic bar-coding suggests it’s a sister to Dendrogyra cylindrus of the Caribbean, but until scientists publish a formal description, it remains the marine equivalent of Prince’s “Love Symbol”—famous but technically nameless.

Local fishers have known these coral “gardens” forever and still use the ancestral nicknames their grandfathers coined: Garden of the Ancestors, Dragon’s Breath, Miracle Reef. That oral map has been priceless for biologists trying to GPS-pin hotspots.

Since 2015, Somali marine-science grads, coastal youth groups, and visiting GCRMN coaches have run community reef-patrols: paddling out in dugout canoes, free-diving to log bleaching or blast-fishing scars, then uploading data once they paddle back to a café with cell service.  Between dives, elders on the beach recite sea-lore poetry while the kids type coordinates into tablets—arguably the coolest bilingual science slam on the planet.

Down south in the Bajuni Archipelago, villagers are experimenting with a “living-fence” trick. Instead of pouring concrete seawalls, they cable broken branches of Acropora onto shallow slopes. The fragments fuse, grow, and within three monsoon seasons form a bumpy, wave-breaking rampart that doubles as a fish nursery. Western NGOs now fly in to copy the idea—proof that sometimes the low-tech hack beats the million-dollar solution.

So, when someone moans that all coral is doomed or that the only good reef left is the one on Instagram, lean in and whisper: “Try Somalia first.” You’ll be tipping them off to one of the Indian Ocean’s best-kept secrets—an underwater festival that kept right on dancing while the rest of the world wasn’t watching. 🌊🐟

Along the wind-sculpted shores of Puntland—our semi-autonomous northeast—I still watch hand-painted dhows glide out at dawn. The deckhands laugh that our loose-weave “maraq” nets have two jobs: catching dinner and letting the smallest fish wriggle free so tomorrow’s stew will be fatter. (In Somali, maraq means “soup”—perfect irony, right?) Because the nets float just above the coral heads, they spare juvenile fish and the living reef below. Every visiting consultant expects coastal Somalia to behave like a war-torn wasteland; instead they find centuries-old gear that modern trawlers could learn from.

Elders as Eco-Referees

We don’t have one grand “reef council” crowned in paperwork. What we have are the wise oday-ga kalluunka—fish elders—who meet whenever the moon rolls into spawning phase. Under a palm lean-to they share tea, trade Maay-dialect verses about octopus courtship (honestly more romantic than Tinder), then announce a no-take period. Break that taboo and you’ll fetch water from the far well—or eat alone at weddings. I tag along with my clipboard, but social pressure keeps order far better than any fine.

Scientists who’ve swum our octopus beds say densities here rival managed Pacific fisheries. Hearing that, one elder grinned: Warabeeygu wuxuu leeyahay badda waa nolosheena—our heritage says the sea is our life. Simple math, really.

From Custom to Community MPA

In 2018 our Ministry of Fisheries partnered with Secure Fisheries and local committees to turn custom into policy: the Eyl Community Marine Protected Area (CMPA). Motorboats stay out of the core zone; carved wooden stakes mark daily catch limits; elders now patrol with smartphones clipped to bamboo poles. After two full seasons, our dive surveys show red-snapper yields up roughly 25–30 percent. A global headline? Maybe not. A village supper you can taste? Absolutely.

Culture That Feeds

Dusk on the jetty feels like a block party. Baskets of crimson kaluno swap for sorghum flour; women whip sweet malaay porridge while goatskin drums keep tempo. I once tried to navigate home by stars like Uncle Yusuf—missed Orion, stepped off the planks, and baptised my field notes. Lesson logged: trust the elders before the GPS.

Bigger-Picture Payoff

A recent FSNAU bulletin hints that children in our coastal fishing districts show slightly lower wasting rates than inland peers—likely thanks to the extra protein we haul ashore. Critics argue our rules are “too informal to scale.” I invite them to share a meal here, then tell me if informality tastes this good.

The sea is our story—and every tide has a lesson. May the next wave carry these lessons far beyond Puntland’s headlands. 🌊✨