Chasing Coral is a Netflix documentary about corals. Half of them have been lost over the past 30 years, but hope of saving these extraordinary animals is very much alive. Here are the reasons why we should all watch it.
Without venturing into spoilers, there are two key moments that stay with you while watching Chasing Coral. The first is when you discover that corals are not merely living beings, but true animals — extraordinarily complex beneath their outwardly simple (and wondrous) appearance. A coral is, in fact, an animal made up of many other animals. "A single coral is composed of thousands of tiny structures called polyps," biologist Ruth Gates explains in the documentary. "Each polyp has a circular mouth surrounded by tentacles, and millions of them can come together in a single coral."
The second moment is a direct consequence of the first, and reveals how fundamental a role corals play in the wellbeing of the marine ecosystem and, indirectly, in the wellbeing of the entire planet — thanks to a symbiotic relationship with everything around them. Much the same role, in fact, as forests play on land.
"For me, the most interesting thing in nature is symbiosis. Two different organisms that adapt to one another for mutual benefit and work together," says Zack Rago, the coral enthusiast at the heart of the documentary, with evident emotion. "The first example that comes to mind in the marine world is the anemone and the clownfish. The anemone provides protection to the clownfish, which repays the favour by bringing food to the anemone. It's a relationship of mutual exchange. In the case of coral, it's more complex. The symbiont is incorporated within the organism, and the coral could not exist without these tiny plant cells. They are completely dependent on one another — neither could exist alone. That relationship of reciprocity is, to me, the most interesting thing in the world."
It is thanks to these discoveries that watching the documentary — directed by Jeff Orlowski, whose filming spanned three years for a total of over 500 hours of footage — takes an unexpected turn. What begins as a classic work of information and science communication transforms into a drama capable of making the viewer identify with the corals and feel "immersed" in the reality in which they live: the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. It is a drama because the passion-driven protagonists become direct witnesses to the illness and then the rapid death of a multitude of corals around the world. For the first time, they document the phenomenon of the third global bleaching event, which occurred in 2015 using highly advanced technology — following the first, which took place between 1997 and 1998, and the second, which occurred in 2010. Between the second and the third, therefore, only five years had passed. Within the space of 30 years, half of all the world's corals have been lost.
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Coral bleaching is one of the countless consequences of global warming — that is, the rise in average temperature, not only of the air but also of ocean water — caused by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions (such as carbon dioxide, or CO2) released into the atmosphere by human activities, including the burning of oil and coal. Much of the energy and heat caused by excess emissions (the documentary puts the figure at 93 per cent) has been, and continues to be, absorbed by the oceans. Without the oceans' contribution, we would already be "done for," because we would not be discussing an average temperature rise of 3–4 degrees by the end of the century — we would already be experiencing temperatures of around 50 degrees.
And the first mass victims of this phenomenon of ocean warming and acidification are precisely the corals, which undergo bleaching first and death afterwards. Corals bleach because they fall ill, and their reaction to this "fever" is to lose their unique colour, taking on a common bright white, fluorescent hue — almost as if trying to draw the outside world's attention to their condition. When they are white, they are still alive and wait in vain for someone to tend to them. One of the first researchers to study this phenomenon was Australian professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who recounts in Chasing Coral how, towards the end of the 1990s, he was even ridiculed for his publications theorising coral bleaching as one of the most visible signs of climate change and global warming.
Despite the moments of despair and emotion, the documentary closes with an appeal full of hope. It urges viewers to keep informing themselves beyond the film's hour and a half. For instance, by promoting a screening of Chasing Coral in their own town, and by spreading quality information through social networks. To this end, chasingcoral.com makes available to everyone a guide on the steps to follow to reduce the impact of one's own life and community through promoting the use of renewable energy – one of the most useful and straightforward tools to adopt in order to counter climate change, which LifeGate offers by giving everyone the opportunity to choose exclusively renewable energy for their home, produced in Italy. In addition, on the site it is possible to find a number of correct practices to put into action when visiting a marine environment and engaging in activities such as swimming, diving or sailing in open water.
Each one of us can become an ambassador and spokesperson for corals by informing others and calling on local and national institutions to act to cut CO2 emissions through improved efficiency and a rapid transition towards clean energy sources. For all these reasons, and for the emotions it stirs, Chasing Coral is a universally unmissable documentary. Not only for those who care about the fate of future generations, and of the animal and plant species that populate ecosystems. For those who care about the fate of the Earth – the only one we have.