#biodiversity

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.