This story was originally published in Vox and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Once a year, typically after sunset in the late summer, the coral baby-making process begins. Large colonies of coral spawn, spewing out sperm and eggs, often in pea-size bundles, that drift around until they encounter the spawn of other corals. Fertilized eggs turn into coral larvae—tiny and squishy free-swimming organisms—which eventually settle on the seafloor. There they metamorphose, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, into a coral polyp. Those polyps clone themselves over…
