The Current That Feeds East Africa
The East African Coastal Current carries nutrients, larvae and warmth along the coast. Wanjiru speaks with a Lamu fisher and an oceanographer about how it shifts with the monsoon and what that means f…
How a Reef Is Built, One Polyp at a Time
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Show notes
How a reef is built
The first episode starts with the smallest builder in the ocean. A coral polyp is an animal, not a plant, yet it depends on algae living inside its tissue for most of its food. Wanjiru walks through the partnership, the chemistry of calcium carbonate, and the reason a single warm season can undo decades of growth.
- What a polyp is and how it feeds at night
- The algae partnership and why colour equals health
- How limestone skeletons stack into a reef over centuries
- What bleaching looks like from a boat in Watamu
- Why some reefs recover and others do not
Next week we move offshore to the currents that feed the whole coast.
Transcript
Jambo and welcome to Reef and Trench. I am Wanjiru Kamande, a marine biologist in Mombasa, and this is the show where we take the ocean apart slowly so you can see how it works. Today we are starting small. Smaller than a grain of rice. A coral polyp is an animal with a stomach, tentacles and a mouth, and over a few thousand years, a colony of them can build something you can see from space. I want to show you how that happens, why the colour of a reef tells you if it is eating well, and what I saw from a boat in Watamu during the last warm season. Grab a cup of tea, this one is gentle. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts, and the reef is waiting.
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