Bleached coral recovered after a week touching a healthy clone

A bleached coral can get its algae back from a healthy fragment of the same colony. In Science Advances on October 14, 2026, a Stanford team led by Danny Collins reported that brief contact lets the symbiotic algae pass through fused tissue into the bleached piece, which then recovers on its own.¹

In the first trial, all five bleached fragments that touched a healthy partner recovered within seven weeks, while the five kept a few millimeters away died. A single week of contact was enough, and in some cases three days. After a week the algae were doubling about every four days, up to ten times faster than most recovery recorded on reefs.¹²

The tissue only fuses between corals of the same genet, so pairings of different colonies turned antagonistic. Stanford’s account notes that the method needs a healthy, genetically identical copy of every bleached coral, which isn’t feasible at reef scale, and the team plans to explore other ways of delivering the algae.¹²