{"id":115540,"date":"2026-09-15T03:07:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T07:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115540"},"modified":"2026-09-15T03:07:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T07:07:30","slug":"coral-reef-thought-dead-60-years-alive-benin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/coral-reef-thought-dead-60-years-alive-benin\/","title":{"rendered":"A Coral Reef Thought Dead for 60 Years Is Alive Off Benin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>9 Minute, 6 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

In the 1960s, scientists working off the coast of West Africa went looking for good places to fish. About 54 metres below the surface, off the coast of what is now Benin, they picked up signs of a coral reef.<\/p>\n\n

They wrote it down as probably dead.<\/p>\n\n

For about sixty years, that was the whole story. Then, in 2025, a small team went back with sonar, an underwater drone and deep-sea cameras. When the first pictures came up, the coral reef thought dead for 60 years was full of color and fish.<\/p>\n\n

But the most surprising part isn’t that the reef was alive. It’s how it came to be called dead in the first place.<\/p>\n\n

What Scientists Found When the Coral Reef Thought Dead Was Filmed<\/h2>\n\n

The new work was led by G\u00e9rard Zinzindohou\u00e9 of Benin’s fisheries and ocean research institute, the Institut de Recherches Halieutiques et Oc\u00e9anologiques du B\u00e9nin. It was published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science<\/a> this summer.<\/p>\n\n

The team started with sound. In April and May 2025, they towed a sonar along the seabed, using the old 1960s reports as a rough map. They made 35 passes, covering 11.5 kilometres of seabed in all. Two areas bounced the sound back in a way that looked like it could be reef.<\/p>\n\n

In August, they went down to look. They sent an underwater drone, and they set National Geographic’s Deep Sea Camera System on the seafloor for two to three hours at a time, like trail cameras for the ocean.<\/p>\n\n

At 54 metres, on big blocks of rock, they found living coral. The team counted eight types of coral and eight kinds of fish: golden African snappers, blackbar soldierfish, Guinean angelfish, West African goatfish, Monrovia doctorfish, three-banded butterflyfish and two kinds of damselfish.<\/p>\n\n

“I still remember seeing those first images,” Zinzindohou\u00e9 said. “It was a mix of excitement and disbelief, because after all this time thinking about this reef, suddenly there was something real in front of us.”<\/p>\n\n

“To our knowledge,” he added, “this is the first confirmed record of a living mesophotic coral ecosystem on the Gulf of Guinea continental shelf.”<\/p>\n\n