The Red Sea Development Company (TRSDC) has announced that their team of marine science and environment experts discovered a 10-meter high, 600-year-old huge coral colony south of Al-Waqadi Island, part of the project's zone. In a statement to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), the company explained that this rare discovery is the first of its kind in the Red Sea region, estimated at hundreds of years old, which was measured through the size and number of rings that grow annually on the colony's outer structure, in addition to the presence of giant redwood trees, a historic reference for the past centuries. The statement said that the colony would enable scientists to read the rings of coral reefs and learn more about the ocean temperature in previous years, and its chemical composition at the time. TRSDC said the discovery highlights the beauty of marine life on Al-Waqadi Island, west of the Red Sea project, the most attracting tourist destination in the world, which will put the Kingdom on the world tourism map. Coral reefs are living creatures, and their beauty is usually formed when the initial coral unit adheres to a rock in the sea where the seabed and its bases contain a solid structure of limestone, and then this unit begins to divide into thousands of cloned colonies before these creatures are linked to each other to create a colony that behaves as one organism. The company stressed that the importance of these coral colonies lies in the fact that they form a habitat for a huge number of fish and non-vertebrate animals, and that several reasons affect the life cycle of coral reefs, where they die if they are buried by sediments or covered by algae that thrive in polluted aquatic environments, or when their ecosystem is disrupted due to overfishing. In addition, it is being affected by the coral bleaching phenomenon, which results from abnormally high water temperature, increasing with the rise in ocean water temperature due to climate change. Coral bleaching can also lead to the death of coral species and other marine organisms that live with coral reefs and affect them. TRSDC said they will work to enhance coral reefs' environments and increase their ecological diversity in the project area, calling on communities to preserve all sea creatures without exception by reducing threats to marine life such as pollution and overfishing. — SPA
