In the early morning, at a lab not too far from the Galveston coast, Shannon Ainsworth is collecting hundreds of tiny, floating brown eggs from a tank of deep-sea coral. She sticks a little plastic dropper into the water, sucks up an egg or two, and deposits them into a beaker on top of the tank. Then she repeats.
The process goes on for several hours until all the eggs in the tank are gone. But that’s just the beginning. The hope is that the eggs will fertilize and then grow—albeit incredibly slowly—into new coral.
