November 16, 2024
How Corals Remember: Archiving Sounds of the Anthropocene in Taiwan
Does nature keep its own historical records? For environmental scientists, the answer is obviously “yes.” Ice cores, for instance, contain layers of ice accumulated over millennia, trapping air bubbles and particles—dust, pollen, and sea salts—that reveal past climates and atmospheric compositions. Similarly, tree rings provide records of environmental conditions, with each ring indicating variations in rainfall and temperature. Sediment layers in glacial lakes attest to geological events such as volcanic eruptions and floods. Dietmar Offenhuber describes these records as “autographic” insofar as they constitute a form of self-writing or self-inscribing, wherein the physical world documents its own history through natural processes and formations.[1] Of course, this idea is hardly novel. Offenhuber, for his part, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s much earlier observation that “all things are engaged in writing their history”—the rolling rock scratching the mountain, the river carving channels in soil, the animal depositing its bones in sediment, or the fern and leaf leaving delicate imprints in coal.[2] Such are the ways in which environmental history has always presented itself.
These autographic records beg the question of preservation, since they, like human-made documents, are subject to the forces of time, decay, and change as they trace ephemeral events. For their part, ice cores, whose fragility makes them vulnerable to melting and fracture, must be carefully extracted from drilling sites and insulated in shallow trenches before they can be studied with digital imaging tools. Similarly, sediment layers, if not disturbed by mining or construction, are sampled with specialized drilling equipment before being prepared for radiometric dating and geochemical analysis. And this is to say nothing of the vulnerability of trees, themselves continuously threatened by deforestation or fire. In other words, nature’s records may require human effort to guarantee their preservation and interpretation—or, their archiving and unarchiving.
Once captured by human instruments, however, natural records often undergo irreversible change, severed as they are from the living, changing world their human guardians hope they will document. Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating), for example, typically occurs after a tree has already died, with its growth halted and its life cycle completed. From this perspective, the act of archiving also signifies a form of containment, an attempt to preserve something inherently dynamic, which it in turn renders inert. This begs the question: Is it possible to archive the self-writing life? And how should humans engage with these autographic records as they naturally form?
Amid the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I found myself captivated by coral reefs. With travel restrictions limiting access to physical archives, I turned to digital collections and discovered an intriguing set of sound recordings titled How Corals Think (珊瑚如何思考). This collection, created by Yannick Dauby (澎葉生), a French artist who has made Taiwan his home, is preserved in the online archives of the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation.[3] The three recordings, each lasting between three and ten minutes, were made in Jing’an (井垵), a location on the southern coast of a long bay near Shili (嵵裡). The area hosts a distinct coral community where damselfish and other marine species thrive near a pebble beach. These recordings offer listeners a rare and captivating opportunity to engage with the rich and vibrant underwater soundscapes of Taiwan’s coral reefs.
For someone like me, who is by no means an expert in bioacoustics, the archived project description provides crucial context for interpreting these sounds in their underwater, sonic context. The first to catch my attention were sharp, rhythmic crackles, which I learned were produced by snapping shrimp—small yet formidable creatures that use their claws to communicate, hunt, and defend their territory. The sound occurs when a shrimp snaps its claw shut, creating a powerful jet of water that generates air bubbles, which rapidly collapse to produce the characteristic pops. Layered over this noise are the calls of damselfish, whose high-pitched clicks echo like the clashing of distant cymbals. And beneath this busy overture is a complex blend of other sounds—grunts, croaks, and chirps from countless unseen creatures—forming a rich and mesmerizing marine soundscape. Yet I couldn’t help but question whether these were truly the sounds of corals. What of the project’s eponymous creatures, seemingly the foundation for these sounds but at the same time not their source? Coral itself exists in a state that blurs the boundaries between life and death, the living and the nonliving, the past and the present. In everyday language, “coral” may refer to the diverse group of marine invertebrates known as “coral polyps” or the hard, calcareous structures these polyps create, commonly known as “coral reefs.” This ambiguity is further complicated by the fact that not all corals build reefs. Soft corals have a flexible, fleshy structure and only form colorful, tree-like colonies. Hard corals, on the other hand, secrete calcium carbonate to form exoskeletons, into which they incorporate elements from the surrounding seawater. Then, when they die, their skeletal remains accumulate, layering over time and preserving records of historical sea temperatures, water conditions, and climatic events in their structure and color.[4] These accumulated, “dead” layers form the foundation of coral reefs, which offer protective shelter, feed areas, and breeding grounds to a vast array of marine species.
Historically, too, coral has confounded scientific classification. In the eighteenth century, natural historians debated whether coral was a mineral, a plant, or an animal. This confusion arose due to the fact that coral’s structure appears as mineral-like, has growth characteristics that resemble those of plants, and responds to external stimuli in a way that would suggest it to be an animal. In 1725, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili suggested that coral reefs were formed by stony plants (“lithophytes”) in his detailed botanical descriptions of coral species, which emphasized their “vegetative, branching, plant-like features.”[5] In 1726, André Peyssonnel challenged this view, arguing that coral reefs were in fact formed by insect-like organisms by demonstrating coral’s animal behavior and biological structure.[6] This debate would continue for generations. In the nineteenth century, for instance, Robert Grant posited coral as a missing link between plants and animals, ultimately inspiring Charles Darwin’s 1842 work, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. With Darwin, coral came under the purview of geology, where specialists focused on the relationship between coral growth and ecological processes.[7] These histories demonstrate how, as Stefan Helmreich notes, coral serves as a “boundary object, an assemblage of flesh and stone” that blurs conventional categories of life forms.[8]
In the early twentieth century, this geological understanding of coral reefs became increasingly intertwined with the visual culture of empire and modernity. In the 1920s, explorers like Frank Hurley and J.E. Williamson sought to capture the ocean’s depths, driven by the promise of “startling visions of the tropics” for their audience.[9] These images of coral reefs also inspired modernist artists; André Breton repurposed Williamson’s photograph of a Bahamian reef, reimagining it as the “Australian Great Barrier” to evoke a surreal, exotic, and remote landscape that embodied his fascination with mystery, the unconscious, uncanny, and convulsive beauty.[10] “With these exotic seas and islands in its possession,” Ann Elias explains, the British Empire became “the coral empire.” In other words, coral reefs offered an imaginative landscape for a burgeoning imperial ideology insofar as they seemed to mirror the perceived natural expansion of and moral justification for colonization. Indeed, the process of acquiring and developing colonies (particularly in tropical areas) felt as natural to empire as the growth of coral reefs themselves.
Elsewhere, in East Asia, coral was revered as a gemstone of visual culture long before Dauby took to the depths with his microphones. Taiwan, for example, earned the nickname “the Coral Kingdom,” because at one point it boasted roughly eighty percent of the world’s red coral production. This red coral, prized for its deep red hues and natural beauty, first became a sought-after commodity in the 1920s, when the “discovery” of a new coral bed near Guishan Island sparked a buying frenzy and solidified Taiwan’s position in the global coral industry. Later, during the Japanese colonial period of the 1930s and 1940s, coral harvesting in Taiwan peaked; active harvesting continued through the 1960s, particularly around the port of Nanfang’ao in Yilan, with support from the Taiwanese government. “Buy corals, visit Taiwan” became a guiding (and telling) slogan of the age.[11]
As I listen to the sound recordings of How Corals Think, humanity’s past encounters with coral reefs continue to challenge my understanding of these life forms that seemingly straddle the boundary between life and death. As Sonia Levy puts it, this is because corals are “intricate multispecies and multiscale ecological units” that reveal how life forms “are not separated from their environment” but instead “constitute environments for themselves and others.”[12] In my listening, the impossibility of separating the living marine organisms from the inorganic reef structure, as well as the difficulty of identifying “coral” as a singular, unified ecological entity, underscore the interdependencies and interconnectedness of this intricate, self-regulating ecosystem. “How could [we] possibly understand what it is to be a lichen, a worm, a bacterium, a gas, a climate, a coral reef, or a cow’s rumen?” asks Bruno Latour, using the coral reef as an example to question the clear-cut boundaries between living organisms and their environment.[13] As the noise of Dauby’s recording project signals, corals demonstrate that diverse life forms and their environments are always dynamically co-constituted.
How Corals Think also marks a distinctive shift from the detached visual culture of coral reefs in the early twentieth century to a newer mode of deeply embodied sensory engagement. In the 1950s, the rising popularity of scuba diving began to transform the ways in which coral reefs were studied and experienced. In Jacques Cousteau’s 1953 book The Silent World and its subsequent documentary, the French oceanographer (often credited with popularizing scuba diving) presented coral reefs not as lifeless geological structures, but as dynamic, living entities within vibrant underwater communities.[14] Similar to Cousteau, Dauby embraces an immersive approach by recording his soundscape while scuba-diving so as to experience coral reefs as living, pulsing ecosystems. Since 2004, for example, Dauby has regularly visited the Penghu archipelago, spending extended periods observing marine fauna and experimenting with underwater recording techniques. Notably, these experiences have allowed him to examine the coral reef ecosystem up close and from the inside.
It is precisely this “inside-ness” that makes underwater soundscape projects like How Corals Think a compelling way to engage with autographic records such as coral reefs. While bioacoustic methods in marine biology have been widely used for more than half a century, their full potential in re-establishing interspecies intimacy is still being explored. Sound travels much faster and farther underwater, while light struggles to penetrate the depths; as a result, sound becomes a more reliable and intimate indicator of life, allowing for a closeness with countless creatures otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Sound brings the distant near without altering animal behaviors and fosters a seemingly unmediated sense of presence within the ecosystem. In doing so, it reminds listeners that marine animals are sensory beings, intimately engaged with their acoustic environments.[15]
This very sense of “inside-ness” has also fueled debates surrounding the perceived “crisis” of the philosophy of history. For Latour, the very concept of modernity arises in part from this division between inside and outside, where “the subjective side begins to be associated with the archaic and outdated” while “the objective side” is linked to what is “modern and progressive.” This contrast frames “seeing things from the inside” as having little value beyond being “traditional, intimate, archaic.” Meanwhile, he claims that “seeing things from the outside” is wrongly portrayed as the only valid way to grasp “the reality that counts” and, more importantly, to orient oneself “toward the future.”[16] To similar effect, in a related conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Latour critiques the philosophy of history for failing to account for the unfolding ecological crisis. There, he suggests that moving away from a philosophy of history focused on time and progress and toward one grounded in geography will be key to recognizing the spatial dimensions of human existence, Earth’s agency, and the entanglements between humans and the planet.[17]
As the global climate crisis continues to unfold, these self-writing natural records have attracted renewed interest. In other words, they have come to challenge a philosophy of history that, in Michel Serres’s words, has been dominated by “the story of human conflict.”[18] We are fascinated by these records not only because they are marvelous creations of nature, but also because they raise difficult questions about whether non-human agents participate in history, act as authors of histories, and serve as custodians of their own records—and, if so, in what ways.
Corals—themselves highly vulnerable to the effects of global warming—are often referred to as the “canary in the coal mine” for climate change.[19] Coral bleaching occurs when corals, stressed by elevated sea temperatures, expel the symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) living within their tissue, causing them to lose their color and their primary source of energy. Although significant bleaching events have been recorded since 1979, the year 1998 marked a turning point in framing coral health as a global concern. The 1998 global coral bleaching event, triggered by unprecedented sea surface temperature anomalies associated with El Niño and other climatic oscillations, was one of the most severe recorded. This event affected the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans, with significant bleaching reported from the Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean. The Indian Ocean experienced the highest levels of coral mortality, with rates often ranging between seventy and ninety-nine percent.[20] The death of coral reefs triggered the collapse of entire marine habitats, affecting fish populations and, consequently, the millions of humans who rely on fishing for their livelihoods. The decline in coral reefs also weakened coastal protections, making communities more vulnerable to storm surges and coastal erosion.[21] When coral bleaching occurs, the sounds of marine life diminish dramatically, with the resulting silence acting as an underwater alarm warning of impending environmental catastrophe.
In this way, corals are perhaps among the most urgent cultural icons of the Anthropocene.[22] Simply put, the history of coral is our history. In addition to providing essential habitats for marine life, humans have also used them as materials for building shelter and protection. From the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, from the East African coast to the Indian Ocean, coral stone has been favored due to its abundance in coastal areas. In Indonesia, for example, the Bajau community on the island of Sumbawa constructed an artificial islet using coral stones. As the Bajau people migrate across the ocean, they have come to rely on coral mining to expand and adapt to shifting climatic conditions. [23] Elsewhere, in the Maldives, coral stone mosques were intricately crafted using ornamental porite coral quarried from nearby reefs, reflecting a unique fusion of architectural influences from East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.[24] In the Caribbean, coral stone was extensively used in colonial architecture, particularly in churches and government buildings, where it was valued for its lightweight nature, durability, aesthetic qualities, and, most importantly, heat-repelling properties.[25]
In Miami, South Florida, where I am writing this essay, corals are not only aesthetic features that have been seamlessly integrated into local architecture and urban design—they also form the literal foundation of the city. Upon arriving at Miami International Airport, travelers are immediately greeted by decorative patterns of coral reefs. In 2020, Coral Morphologic, an art-science duo composed of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay, installed a live-streaming camera at the airport that broadcasts real-time footage of an urban coral reef along Miami’s shoreline. This project, titled Coral City Camera, serves as a poignant reminder that Miami itself was built atop a fossilized coral reef ridge.[26] Similarly, the city’s concrete skyline was constructed using limestone mined from the Everglades, which, for most of the past 150 million years, was a seafloor formed from the remains of marine organisms and coral reefs.[27] And Coral Gables, one of the first major planned communities in the United States, takes its name from the home of George E. Merrick, a Florida governor and urban planner who promoted the use of free coral rock as a building material. [28] Ironically, the city that has benefited so much from its coastal resources now finds itself at the forefront of the climate change crisis.
When Dauby first arrived in the Penghu archipelago in 2004, his fascination with coral reefs was sparked by the local architecture made from coral stone. These coral houses, known as ló-kó-chhù (咾咕厝) in Taiwanese, represent a unique cultural heritage of Penghu, given that they are built from coral stone harvested from nearby reefs.[29] Dauby observed that local residents in Penghu would dive to collect coral blocks, dry them on the shore, and cut them into bricks. The porous structure of this coral made it an ideal building material, as it readily provided natural insulation. However, many of these traditional houses have been abandoned with the advent of modern construction techniques; as coral reef ecosystems deteriorate, coral mining has been recognized as unsustainable. In response, these coral stones have been gradually returned to the seafloor to help revitalize marine life. Nevertheless, the remaining structures serve as a metaphor for multispecies symbiosis—the deep interconnection between human culture and natural environments.
Unfortunately, coral reefs in this region are also deeply politicized, entangled as they are with state power and geopolitical conflict. In the South China Sea, coral reef islands are at the heart of some of today’s most contentious territorial disputes; the Spratly Islands, Paracel Islands, and Scarborough Shoal—primarily consisting of submerged or underwater coral reefs—are fiercely contested due to their strategic locations, abundant fishing grounds, and potential resource reserves. In Taiwan, the roots of the environmental documentary movement over the past three decades can similarly be traced to a growing awareness of national borders and sovereign territories defined by these same coral reef islands. Ke Chin-yuan (柯金源), for example, often credited with pioneering the subgenre of Taiwanese environmental documentary, spent years capturing footage of coral reefs around Taiwan and its outlying islands. [30] In Remember the Coral Reef (記憶珊瑚), he documents the mass destruction of coral reefs under military control in areas such as Pratas Island and the Spratly Islands. In alluding to tragic events in the mid-1980s, wherein Chinese fishing boats detonated explosives on vast stretches of these reefs, this work transforms the life of corals into a national allegory for Taiwan, and their memory into yet another footnote in the broader historical narrative of human conflict.
In tracing these geopolitical lives of the coral reef, I myself am reminded of Serres’s reading of Francisco Goya’s painting Duel with Cudgels, where two men fight to the death, sinking into a quagmire in the background. As Serres observes, “the more heated the struggle, the more violent their movements become, and the faster they sink.” [31] Without noticing “the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh,” the combatants remain unaware of the abyss into which they are rushing. [32] Why is it that the histories we most often remember are those of brutal conflicts and human violence, while the histories we tend to forget are those of the Earth—the “world of things themselves” that silently envelops Goya’s duelists?
Of course, the institutional effort to document and preserve the sounds of coral reefs (as in Dauby’s work) cannot be entirely divorced from human intention. After all, the act of recording is itself a clear attempt to capture these fleeting, fragile underwater ecosystems. While one coral reef community is recorded, countless others remain unheard. In addition, there is always the danger of over-anthropomorphizing marine life by interpreting their sounds as expressions of mourning their own demise, turning them into convenient metaphors for human guilt over the consequences of our actions on these ecosystems.[33]
However, the problem with this view of archiving is that it still presupposes humans as the sole proprietors of history and memory. Corals, too, seem to exhibit their own feverish desire to archive. Living corals rely on the structures created by their dead predecessors, and, as they grow, they also obscure the older layers, erasing the visible record of the past. Just as in human-created archives, this act of archiving acknowledges the inevitable processes of loss, erasure, and exclusion, as well as the perpetually deferred origins of meaning—not just for humans, but for all present and future inhabitants.[34]
To ask “how corals think” is to ask “how corals remember,” or, how they inscribe, store, and communicate their own histories. I return to Offenhuber’s concept of the “autographic” process, which I read as a form of writing through which nonhuman agents inscribe material traces, and environmental patterns function as communicative forces. In this context, the title How Corals Think becomes even more meaningful. It draws a parallel to Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, where Kohn, through his multispecies ethnography in the Amazon, explores the communicative modes of nonhuman agents.[35] Kohn’s central argument—that forests “think” not through symbolic systems, but through iconic and indexical signs—aligns with the autographic, self-inscribing forces at play in all kinds of natural processes and formations. As nonhuman forms of life communicate and leave material traces in the world, they are also writing and archiving history.
It is hard to believe that the pandemic itself is already a history, leaving behind countless archival records that feel both immediate and distant. As I unarchived these sound recordings of coral reefs, their meanings had already begun to shift as they brought me into the world of the coral reef. Even Latour has a personal story about coral reefs. During the first pandemic lockdown, he found himself questioning whether there was truly anything “outside” of the confinement and the familiar world of the urbanite. On a summer visit to the Vercors region of France, standing at the foot of the Grand Veymont, a companion—a geologist—revealed that the cliff they were exploring was actually “a graveyard of corals,” a vast, ancient conurbation of once-living organisms. These remains had been compressed, buried, and transformed into sparkling Urgonian chalk, which the geologist described as “bioclastic,” meaning that it was made from the debris of living things. Humans, he thought, are not so different from corals, as both the city he had come from and the valley he found himself in had been built from layers of life. “As a result, I feel a bit less alienated,” Latour remarked: “I can go on crawling along like a crab further and further. My door is no longer locked shut.”[36]
Corals pose a challenge for archiving in the Anthropocene, positioning the archive as a space where life and death, the living and nonliving, intertwine. While nature always documents its own histories through a continuous, self-inscribing process, human archiving risks severing these records from their environment, detaching them from the life processes they once embodied. Despite these challenges, autographic records remain valuable repositories of natural history and, equally importantly, offer endless opportunities for us to understand the entanglement between all forms of life and their environments. Engaging with these autographic records seems to call for a shift in perspective—from distant, detached observation to an embodied, sensory engagement that connects us to the natural processes we seek to understand, exemplifying an interspecies intimacy that the sounds of coral reefs so beautifully embody.
I am grateful to Marc Kohlbry, Hannah Miller, and Elizabeth Wijiaya for their generous feedback and valuable insights on this essay.
[1] Offenhuber, Autographic Design, 14.
[2] Emerson, “Goethe: Or, the Writer,” 746.
[3] Dauby, “Shanhu Ruhe Sikao 珊瑚如何思考 [How Corals Think].”
[4] St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center, “Coral Reefs as Climate Archives.”
[5] Navakas, Coral Lives, 80.
[6] Bowen, “Peysonnell, Jean-Andre (1694–1759),” 798.
[7] Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life, 49–50.
[8] Helmreich, 49.
[9] Elias, Coral Empire, 4.
[10] Elias, “Sea of Dreams,” 1.
[11] Huang and Ou, “Precious Coral Fisheries Management,” 1003.
[12] Levy, “For the Love of Corals.”
[13] Latour, “Why Gaia Is Not a God of Totality,” 77. Elsewhere, in his attempts to understand complex life systems like the coral reef, Latour often invokes James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis to challenge the “parts/whole” division of the biosphere. The Gaia Hypothesis remains controversial within scientific discourse, with critics arguing that it lacks sufficient empirical evidence, borders on pseudoscience, and that its depiction of Earth as a self-regulating system maintaining conditions favorable for life may be interpreted as “teleological.” However, Latour’s interest in Gaia, while largely for its figurative and rhetorical value, does not involve reviving the notion of Earth as a singular, self-regulating organism or a providential entity overseeing the planet. For Latour, Gaia emphasizes the inseparable relationship between life forms and their environments, highlighting the impossibility of disentangling one from the other. For more on this, see Facing Gaia. Nonetheless, Latour’s work has been scrutinized for its potential misuse in climate change denial. Latour questioned whether his own critiques had inadvertently contributed to this trend, noting that arguments intended to deconstruct scientific authority were being repurposed to cast doubt on established scientific facts (see Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”).
[14] This view contrasts with that of Darwin and his contemporaries, who treated coral reefs as geological surfaces, studying coral fragments brought up by sailors. For Helmreich, this methodological shift has also redefined coral reefs from static, architectural metaphors to living, pulsing ecosystems (Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life, 52–6).
[15] Eva Hayward’s argument on corals, for example, centers around the concept of “fingeryeyes,” which encapsulates a multisensory, embodied way of knowing that merges vision and touch to understand the world, particularly in interspecies interactions. Sound is an integral part of this multisensory experience. By incorporating auditory elements such as hydrophones and frequency tape recorders, Hayward emphasizes that sensory data—including sound—can transduce experiences and provoke responses, thereby shaping a more comprehensive understanding of interspecies relationships. This process creates a synesthetic relationship between humans and corals, where both species leave sensory impressions on each other through multisensory engagement. It becomes a form of intimacy that frames the relationship with corals as one of shared sensitivity—a form of interconnectedness built on touch, closeness, and the mutual recognition of life forms sensing and being sensed by one another (see Hayward, “Fingeryeyes”).
[16] Latour, Down to Earth, 71.
[17] Latour and Chakrabarty, “Conflicts of Planetary Proportion—A Conversation,” 419.
[18] Serres, The Natural Contract, back cover.
[19] Brown and Ogden, “Coral Bleaching,” 68.
[20] Goreau et al., “Conservation of Coral Reefs,” 10.
[21] See Goreau, “Indigenous/Endogenous Sea Peoples.”
[22] Schuster, “Coral Cultures in the Anthropocene.”
[23] Djohani, “The Bajau.”
[24] Jameel, “Architecture of Coral Stone Mosques of the Maldives.”
[25] Rezende, “Coral as an Early Building Material.”
[26] Coral Morphologic, “Coral City Camera.”
[27] Coral Morphologic, “On Super Corals.”
[28] Parks, George Merrick’s Coral Gables, 10.
[29] Dauby, “Ló-Kó-Chhù.”
[30] Jobin, “Environmental Movements in Taiwan’s Anthropocene,” 67.
[31] Serres, The Natural Contract, 1.
[32] Serres, 2.
[33] See Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” 160.
[34] Derrida, Archive Fever.
[35] Kohn, How Forests Think.
[36] Latour, After Lockdown, 7.
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