Boxing the Pacific: How Mobility Technology Created New Coral Reefs in the Twentieth Century

Corals are slow-growing, slow-spreading organisms concentrated in the tropical and subtropical belt of the world’s oceans. Historically, moving coral required their death and preservation. In the early 1960s, communities in the Indo-Pacific began to share methods for capturing and shipping coral into captivity in aquariums throughout the world. This article traces both the transfer of knowledge and the movement of corals from the 1960s to the present to show how the methods used for the mobilization of coral changed both the coral and the perception of reefs worldwide.