Photo source: Acropora – CC BY-SA 3.0
The world’s corals have reached a grim milestone, with scientists around the world confirming the fourth global bleaching event on record.
In April 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that researchers had documented bleaching events in each major ocean basin. As ocean temperatures rise, the heat can expel the algae that live in corals, giving them their bright colors. Corals can survive bleaching, but if the water remains warm for too long, they cannot survive.
Large-scale coral reef destruction tends to be evaluated from biological and economic perspectives. Coral reefs support approximately 25% of all marine life, protect human life and property by buffering coastlines, and support the global economy through fishing and tourism.
However, the loss of coral takes a huge psychological, psychological and cultural toll. This is one of his main themes in my research and recent book, Coral Lives. Centuries of writings, paintings, stories, and rituals show that corals have given meaning to human life for almost as long as we have marveled at them.
protective power
From the Middle Ages to the 19th century, anxious new parents in Europe and North America wore red coral necklaces and bracelets on their children, letting them hold red corals or have them put in their teeth. Because coral was a symbol of physical and spiritual protection. Early Christian art from the Middle Ages and Renaissance often depicts the Baby Jesus wearing red coral, and scholars believe this may be because the color symbolized the blood of Christ. Suggests.
More secular portraits, especially from the 18th and 19th centuries, also show coral surrounding the necks and wrists of babies and children. Often children have in their hands a “coral and bell”, which is a combination of a toy and a teething aid. Children shook it as a rattle and chewed on the red coral shaft to soothe sore gums. The item was cherished by presidential families and poets alike, from George Washington to Henry Wadsworth and his Longfellow, who even wrote about it. “Coral and Bell” was so popular as a baptismal gift that stores had very little stock of it.
For these families and countless others over the centuries, coral was more than just an ornament. By giving coral to their children, parents were protecting what was most important to them: their children’s lives.
Birth of coral
Belief in the protective powers of corals dates back to at least the classical period. According to the 1st century Roman poet Ovid, coral has the power to petrify. It was originally caused by Sango’s touch with Medusa, a snake-haired gorgon who can turn others to stone with its gaze. In his epic poem Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the hero Perseus cutting off Medusa’s head and placing it on a bed of seaweed, which hardened into coral. By the Middle Ages, this story gave rise to the popular belief that wearing coral could ward off the “evil eye.”
Coral was also believed to have healing properties. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote about coral’s sacred and medicinal properties in his encyclopedia of the natural world, Historia Naturale. He claimed that the substance could cure various diseases when ingested. This also explains why people once thought chewing coral was healthy for children.
Of course, modern medicine opposes these ideas. But during a historical period when child mortality rates could have reached nearly 50 percent, corals allayed the fears of anxious parents.
To this day, in some parts of the world, corals continue to give us a sense of control over situations that are out of our control. In southern Italy, people give cornicello to each other for good luck. This is a small horn-shaped amulet, often made of red coral. Some rosaries are still made of red coral beads, just as they were in the Middle Ages.
Local ties
Corals are not only a symbol of protection, but also a symbol of belonging. Throughout the African diaspora from the 18th century to the 19th century, free and enslaved women in many communities wore red coral stones on special occasions to commemorate their shared past and forge new bonds. I was wearing jewelry.
For example, groups of women in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean wear coral necklaces, earrings, and bracelets during jonconne, a Christmas holiday masquerade ball that originated in West Africa and incorporates traditional music and dance. was.
As historian Steve O. Buckridge explains, these women used clothing and jewelry to communicate their identity nonverbally. Wearing coral was a way for women to stay connected to the African culture from which they were cut off by slavery. In many cultures, red coral beads were, and in some cases still are, objects of spiritual, economic, and cultural significance.
In fact, corals were so valuable that they came to play a violent role in history. In the coastal regions of West Africa, coral became the currency of the transatlantic slave trade, where slave traders traded coral for humans.
But when women in the diaspora donned coral, creating a different present and future became part of their choice. As scholar Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has also observed, each of their elaborate Jonconne costumes was a symbol of “not only splendor and beauty” within the various “kinship groups” that they independently devised. It represented a form of social belonging. Coral simultaneously represented slavery and hope for new possibilities.
build the future
After the Civil War, black communities in the United States embraced coral for other reasons. During Reconstruction, writers, religious leaders, and activists looked to coral reefs as inspirational models as these communities struggled to create a more just country.
Even the largest coral reefs are made up of millions of microscopic animals called polyps, which many people in the 19th century understood as “workers” working together to build the reef. According to African American poet and civil rights activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, coral reefs grow by preserving other reefs, rather than by devaluing them or forcing them out. In his 1871 poem “The Little Builders,” Harper wrote about how listeners and readers, black and white, should work to build the social and economic bonds on which equality depends. I chose a coral reef as an example.
But Harper knew the outcome was far from certain. That’s why the coral analogy worked so well. As Charles Darwin explained in his famous 1842 paper on corals, coral reefs are shaped by so many relationships between different individual organisms over vast periods of time that their future shape and form is unpredictable.
As my book shows, black writers like Harper found hope in that unpredictability. For them, it meant that the actions of one seemingly insignificant individual could help transform the entire system.
sadness and preservation
The biological uniqueness of corals and their central role in sustaining other living things, including humans, are good reasons to conserve them. And scientists are undertaking extraordinary efforts, such as moving endangered species to drying tanks on land and developing tools to predict ocean heatwaves months in advance.
But for centuries, corals have shaped thinking about difficult human issues, from love and loss to social injustice. Coral reefs have provided knowledge, stories, hope, and history to many cultures, far beyond the handful mentioned here. As we lose corals, we are also losing the materials that have given us important ways to understand and act in an increasingly chaotic world.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on September 5, 2023.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
