In 1985, if you walked into a jewelry store in Lahaina Maui the first thing you would see is a big sign saying “we sell the famous Maui black coral necklace.” That famous black coral almost went extinct just like the jewelry stores that sold it , but now like Lahaina, it is slowly coming back to life.
Most people who have worn a black coral necklace do not even know what it is or where it came from. Almost all hard stony corals are white when they are removed from the sea because that is the color of the coral’s hard calcium carbonate skeleton.
When the coral is alive out on the reef it may be a pink, yellow, blue, green or brown color and this is due to the algae that grows within the live coral tissue. The coral colors are produced when the algae undergoes photosynthesis in the sunlight and produces sugars that the coral feeds on. Different algae species within the coral are different colors.
Black coral is different because it lives in deep water or in caves where there is little sunshine. The hard black coral skeleton is only black when it is dried, cleaned and polished. Deep underwater the live black coral is bright orange or a tan color. This is due to the color of the soft live coral polyps that live within the hard skeleton. The black coral polyps get their bright orange color from dissolved minerals in the sea water because it lives deep enough where it does not get much sunlight.
In order to find live black coral one must dive down deeper than 100 feet or dive into deep underwater caves. Off the coast of Maui are some deep underwater cliffs and free divers dove down with hand saws and long ropes to cut the coral off of the cliff and haul it up to the surface onto small boats.
Back in the 1980s this coral was so valuable that several famous surfers used to risk their lives diving for black coral to supplement their income. Dick Brewer, a well known surfboard shaper told me how he used to dive down to 150 feet deep with fellow surfer Jose Angel to collect huge black coral trees and on one dive Jose went too deep and never came back up.
Underwater, the black coral looks like an orange colored tree where its branches are covered in feathers instead of leaves. The first time I saw this beautiful coral was in a deep water cave near Ni‘ihau Island and when I turned on my bright dive lights it was just a stunning sight.
By the 1990s,most of the Hawai‘i black coral had been removed from the sea and sold to jewelry stores to be dried, polished and cut up into necklaces. Some black coral remained untouched because it was living back in deep underwater caves and now that it is fully protected from collecting it is slowly coming back to life, just like Lahaina itself.
Black coral is a unique coral species and it creates its own underwater forest that has its own marine life species. The beautiful orange colored long nose hawkfish only lives in black coral. Certain muscle and scallop species only grow on black coral, so when it was over collected and almost wiped out these additional species almost went extinct.
Now that Lahaina is growing back and new jewelry stores start popping up again, hopefully they can show my black coral movies on a TV screen and sell jewelry made from other marine life species that are common or even sell black coral that is captive produced and raised. You can see the black coral in it native environment in my movie about the underwater caves of Ni‘ihau on my YouTube channel at Underwater2web.
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Terry Lilley is a marine biologist living in Hanalei Kaua‘i and co-founder of Reef Guardians Hawai‘i, a nonprofit on a mission to provide education and resources to protect the coral reef. To donate to Reef Guardians Hawai‘i go to www.reefguardianshawaii.org.
