‘Janitors’ of the Sea: Sea Cucumbers Play Crucial Role in Protecting Coral

I have children that are in their mid to late 30s. I can't show them an average Caribbean reef of when they were born. One doesn't exist anymore. Sea cucumbers are really kind of uninteresting looking invertebrates that just suck sand in one end and poop it out the other having cleaned the organics and bacteria out of it. If you've ever had a fish tank that has a little fish along the glass that's sitting there eating the scum, they're the scum suckers of the reef bottom, the Roombas of the reef. In parts of French Polynesia we found some areas where sea cucumbers of one species were still fairly abundant. We essentially picked out natural sand patches to either remove the sea cucumbers from the area or leave them in place and then we would go plant corals into those areas. My hope for this research one is just to have a better understanding of how coral reefs work but also bringing attention to the world that this is an organism that probably plays a very important role and it might be beneficial to be able to set them aside and continue to protect them or boost their numbers to help clean up the reef. Humans may have sort of lit an ecological fuse that's been burning for decades and then is blowing up on us now. You can either give up and go home or you can keep working on it but we do need to take it seriously and start doing something.