A Teen Found Fungi That Eat Plastic — And 7 More Signs the Ocean Is Fighting Back

At 10 p.m. off Key Largo, the water began to glow. Just after dark on August 2, millions of egg and sperm bundles erupted from elkhorn corals in synchronized breeding — a spectacle so rare the moon itself has to cue it. This year, for the first time in memory, scientists weren't just watching. Twelve organizations worked together to collect, fertilize, and cryopreserve that fleeting genetic gold. Because as Mote Marine Laboratory knows all too well: fewer than 150 elkhorn corals remain on Florida's reef. Just 1% of what once was.

That sense of an ocean in retreat — but also of an ocean fighting back — threads through this season's tide of research. And the most hopeful part is who's now doing the fighting.

A teenager found a cleanup crew hiding in a coconut

Vera Wang was a sophomore at Hawaii's Kaiser High School when she built an ocean filter out of coconut waste, drawing on Polynesian weaving traditions to trap microplastics and sunscreen in seawater. But working in Anthony Amend's lab at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, she noticed something stranger: naturally occurring fungi were living in those husks — and they could biodegrade plastic and sunscreen themselves. Two years later, the senior's discovery, recognized at the 2026 Hawaiʻi State Science & Engineering Fair, points toward a biological solution to the ocean's most stubborn pollution.

Just inland, a different kind of patience paid off. Scrambling through dense salal under ancient western red cedars, a Ph.D. researcher and her Haida Nation partners found the first marbled murrelet nest recorded on Haida Gwaii in more than 30 years — the second ever confirmed on the island. A robin-sized seabird that flies inland to lay a single egg on a high branch, the murrelet is a living bridge between ocean and forest.

Science is learning to see underwater — and under the sediment

While some researchers chase coral eggs and bird nests, others are hunting answers beneath the seafloor. A new data-assimilation framework called LMR4D-Var is rewriting how scientists "weigh time itself," folding centuries-long borehole temperature records into climate reconstruction. The result: a cooler Little Ice Age ocean than we thought — meaning we're learning to measure the planet's memory with far sharper precision.

Closer to the surface, a Concordia team led by Ph.D. candidate Milad Ezzati found that mackinawite — an iron sulfide mineral in oxygen-depleted lake sediments — can trap phosphorus even when other minerals give up, potentially unlocking why some lakes recover from algal blooms while others don't.

In Indonesia, where more than 660,000 hectares of seagrass store blue carbon, professor Rohani Ambo-Rappe and colleagues at Hasanuddin University mapped the Seagrass Ecological Quality Index across 21 meadows, pinpointing hotspots, coldspots, and outliers to steer conservation to where it matters most. And on Colombia's Caribbean coast, a young Champeta musician named Jalimer shows how art and biology can meet: as the Science Advances authors argue, coral-inspired installations in cities worldwide make the unseen underwater world visible and urgent.

Across every depth — from shallow seagrass to fossilized borehole — the story is the same: the ocean isn't just a victim. It's a system we're finally learning to listen to, protect, and restore. The corals spawned within a lunar window, the fungi ate plastic, and a teenager in Hawaii helped show the way. The next generation of the sea is being written now — and its authors are impossibly young.