The lowly sea cucumber may be helping to protect coral reefs against disease

"You can just break off a branch from a coral, plant it into the sandy bottom, and it will grow into a whole new coral," explains Clements.

And in new research published in Nature Communications, he and his colleagues demonstrate that when they removed sea cucumbers from a study patch, tissue death of Acropora pulchra, a species of staghorn coral, more than tripled.

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