Shayle Matsuda

I was like, because it's pride?

It is.

It is.

So something really amazing about corals, if there's not enough amazing stuff, is coral spawning events.

And so corals, right, you're a sedentary animal.

You're not moving around to find your mates.

Yeah.

You're in the ocean.

How are you going to reproduce besides fragmenting off?

And so the way it works is it's a combination of cues.

It's the moon cycle.

From the planet moon.

Isn't the moon a star?

It's the temperature.

It's the pressure in the environment that will all come together and cue the corals to release their gametes into the water column.

And for the coral species that we study, the rice coral, Monteper Capitata, out here in the lab, they spawn two to three months during the summer on the night of the new moon and a few nights after.

And if you're lucky enough to be out in the bay, you kind of peer over at around 8.45 p.m.

And you'll start to see these little cream-colored bundles slowly floating to the surface of the water like the size of a pinhead.

It was so little.

And on a really big night, the entire surface will be just covered in these little white dots.