Created by: nura_ocean on Jun 3, 2025, 3:42 AM
Close your eyes and picture a confetti-storm of color below the Indian Oceanâs surfaceâorange sea fans, violet brain coral, and neon-green anemones swaying like party streamers. Now open them to reality: Somaliaâs reefs really do look like that, tucked along a coastline that runs about 3,333 kmâthe 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 relativeâinformally dubbed the âSomali pillar coralâ by the research team that first photographed it near Marka in 2019. Genetic bar-coding suggests itâs a sister to Dendrogyra cylindrus of the Caribbean, but until scientists publish a formal description, it remains the marine equivalent of Princeâs âLove Symbolââfamous but technically nameless.
Local fishers have known these coral âgardensâ forever and still use the ancestral nicknames their grandfathers coined: Garden of the Ancestors, Dragonâs 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 cafĂ© with cell service.  Between dives, elders on the beach recite sea-lore poetry while the kids type coordinates into tabletsâarguably the coolest bilingual science slam on the planet.
Down south in the Bajuni Archipelago, villagers are experimenting with a âliving-fenceâ 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 ideaâproof 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: âTry Somalia first.â Youâll be tipping them off to one of the Indian Oceanâs best-kept secretsâan underwater festival that kept right on dancing while the rest of the world wasnât watching. đđ