The Parable of the Corals

Growing up, aquarium-keeping was my passion. If you enjoy a challenge, and many aquarists do, you start with goldfish and move up the chain to tropical fish, invertebrates, saltwater fish, and finally, corals.

A fully grown-in reef tank is stunning. Its dynamic, vibrant, and teeming with life - a box of water filled with living rock. But it’s also delicate. The most stunning corals - reef-building soft-polyp stonies, need persistently impeccable water quality to survive.

Water quality is a moving target. Corals need calcium, alkalinity, and organics in the water to build their skeletons and maintain their tissues. Because they pull these out of the water, the reef keeper needs to constantly replace them - but not too much. (A bit) too much food, alkalinity, or calcium will kill your corals. On the other hand, a reef might burn through a tank’s entire supply of calcium in the matter of days, or often hours. Even with sophisticated machinery designed to solve these problems, constant attention is what keeps the most beautiful corals alive. Even a day of neglect can kill.

Despite this, if you can give them what they need, corals will grow. Erstwhile delicate species will kill their neighbors and conquer territory, and soon cutting back their overgrowth becomes a headache of its own. Get the conditions right, you get rampant growth. Get them wrong, your reef is default-dead and the clock starts ticking.

Not all corals are quite alike. Once neglect sets in, the most vibrant stonies kick the can. Then, the hardier stonies - your Green Slimers and such - start flagging. Then, your large polyp stonies - less vibrant, but very dynamic - bite the dust. Finally, your soft corals die - the ones that eek out a living in dirty lagoons and tidal shallows. Once you’ve killed your Zoanthids, which are used to living hours exposed to air, you should probably call it.

Each of these “water marks” are stable. If you can’t do hourly calcium drips, you might not be able to pull off the most incredible stonies, but your green slimer will probably still make it. If you can’t do daily calcium, but can do weekly, you’ll probably be fine with a few duncans and hammers. If dosing Kalkwasser is out of the question, period, but you can filter your water, Zoas and mushrooms are good to go. A tank of Zoanthids and mushrooms is great! But it’s certainly not the same thing. Stonies will stun your guests, while zoas will be a pleasant curiosity.

It’s a funny coincidence that the most beautiful corals are also the most delicate. But I think many systems work like coral reefs, and that for humans, teams, institutions, and civilizations, it’s hardly a coincidence that the most powerful, desirable growth is also the most precarious.

Probably the most shocking and disgusting trends - and of course there’s plenty of competition for that title - of the past few years was the chorus of lockdown supporters shouting down critics of school closures with “kids are resilient!” You might land here or there on the net tradeoffs of lockdowns etc, that’s really not what I’m getting at. Getting a good-faith cost-benefit analysis wrong is unfortunate, but not damning - on the other hand, claiming that extremely adverse conditions don’t impact people, let alone kids, is nakedly and callously false.

The truth is, some kids, people, teams, institutions are like Zoanthids. They’ll reach their full potential as long as you don’t actively seek to kill them. Some Zoanthids are actually quite striking, and the same holds for people/teams/etc. Resilience and potential don’t trade off 1-for-1, and some people will accomplish quite a lot even in the absolute worst conditions. But some kids, people, teams, institutions, civilizations really are like stonies. Given the right conditions, they balloon and flourish - and over medium/long time scales, they crowd out everything else that matters. But, they’re fragile and need constant care. Even getting a few parameters wrong is disqualifying.

Luck and/or wishful thinking doesn’t give you a reef tank, it doesn’t give you the European enlightenment, it doesn’t give you Starlink in your flight. Material conditions, norms, incentives, talent, and investment - persistently over long time scales - do. Compounding isn’t fire and forget. Compounding is waking up at 3am to drip calcium solution into your tank because your pump died.