Saving coral with rapid regeneration

Well that's cool.

He had been trying to remove a coral from the bottom of a tank when it broke into a dozen pieces. To his shock, all of the pieces regrew to the same size in just three short weeks, as opposed to the three years it had taken to grow the original coral.

It typically takes coral 25 to 75 years to reach sexual maturity. Instead, through a process of 'breaking up' the coral, Doctor Vaughan has seen the timeline shrink to three years and seen results that will lead him to share the information with conservationists all around the world, with the hopes of planting 100,000 pieces of coral around the Florida Reef Tract by 2019 and millions more around the world in the years to come.

At worst, the method led by Vaughan is something that will buy conservationists more time. At best: this is the beginning of a solution. A former intern of Vaughn's commented on Reddit, adding a very useful note to indicate that Vaughan "has been essentially adjusting the coral frag[ments] to more acidic and warm water to better prepare them for our changing climate." This appears to be what makes the process Vaughan describes unique, as the process of fragmenting coral to encourage growth has been around since at least the 1960s.

I cannot find where the text below came from. Best guess is that it was originally in the article but got removed for some reason.

Somebody said, "now for 10 million dollars could you take the Elkhorn corals off the endangered species list ?". I'd say, "Yes." it can be done and it can be done in the next few years. How incredible ! There's no reason that world-wide we can't replace these corals and get our oceans back the way the way they used to be.

http://bit.ly/2QzeLrH