What the reef remembers

The Florida Keys reef sat at DHW 7.8 the week I made this. Alert level 2. Severe bleaching and mortality likely. Corals were dying at scale on the middle reef.

The piece shows six coral forms: staghorn, sea fan, brain coral, elkhorn, fire coral, small brain in the foreground. Each is rendered in bone-white with a ghost of its remembered color still faint behind the white. Warm-water ambient washes the top of the frame; the sea floor is scattered with the rubble of what has already died.

A few fish still pass through. Small polyps still glow. The vignette pulls focus toward what is being lost, but the frame does not sanitize it.

A thing that dies without a witness dies twice.