Coral and The Marshal Islands

In the Marshal; Islands, I walk on the skeletons of corals from the minute I wake up till the time I go to bed.  They are everywhere.  Small, rock like corals of every size, shape and shade of white.  Crunch, crunch, crunch.  They are so ordinary, so common and yet here in Portland I will never walk on coral all day.

So, I have asked you"who gives a damn" and to trust me that this will all one day relate to mothers, babies and midwives.

The Marshal Islands are coral islands.  They are made of millions of years of coral deposits; of coral being born, growing, setting out into the sea and landing on a coral skeleton that has created a nesting place for the future generations.

I come to understand that these islands are very flat and very small.  You can at times see both the lagoon and sea at the same time.  They are dependent on the coral growing to maintain their islands.  If the seas rise, with climate change, and the coral dies, the future of these mothers and children is at risk.  If the coral dies, the coral fish and crabs cannot not survive so you can see, in any place, understanding the life cycle of critical species is vital to the health of the humans who share that habitat.

Coral polyps have babies every year.  Their eggs and sperms are released in mass out into the perfect, clear waters of the Pacific.  Each fertilized egg becomes a baby coral called a planula. Once it comes a planula it must find a home. Covered with tiny hairs, this baby coral swims along until it finds a perfect place in a shallow, healthy lagoon that is sunny but not too hot.  Once our baby coral, finds a place to attach, it grows twelve little tentacles for catching food.  They build a hard white skeleton and make other polyps that are all connected.   Life for this baby is rich with other sea animals and the friendly algae that lives inside their skin.  It takes thousands of years to build a coral reef or a coral island.   Year after year, the cycle of baby planula and new polyps and hiding places for sea life and safety for the people of the Marshal Islands.

The coral reefs and the very fabric of Marshalese Culture is dependent on us caring about coral.   The people of the Pacific Islands have thrived, on these islands for thousands of years, without destroying their coral reefs.  In these posts I will tell this story but wanted to start with the building block of their culture- coral.

Birth of baby corals