There is a photograph from Roatán of a monitoring team loading dive tanks onto a boat. In most respects it is unremarkable: tanks, straps, the flat early light off the Honduran coast. What stands out is that every person in the frame is a woman. Nobody staged it. Nobody had to. Because on this stretch of coast, it has stopped being unusual.

The divers are heading out to run a survey. Fish are counted along a measured transect, benthic cover is recorded, and photo quadrats are shot to a fixed method, so that the same square-metre of reef can be compared against itself come the next season. It’s a research and monitoring project being upheld by locals and volunteers. It is citizen science in its most impactful action.

Beatriz Do Carmo Amaral, a coral reef conservation diver is among those in the field, contributing to this research. She was drawn to the project because she wanted to help Caribbean pillar coral rebound and regrow. “What I didn’t expect was just how many ways this project would help us grow, too,” she says.

“Every step of the way, we are learning something new here. The community has a depth of knowledge of the fauna and the flora that cannot be surpassed. We are all learning a lot about the different types of monitoring.”

Pillar coral is unmistakable. It is the only coral in the Caribbean that grows as tall vertical columns, and one of a small number of hard corals whose polyps stay extended during daylight, giving each colony a furred, shifting surface. Divers who saw it back in the 1990s describe it as ‘the thing you swam towards’.

Today, most people no longer expect to find one. Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease moved through the Caribbean with extraordinary speed, and Dendrogyra cylindrus has lost more than 80% of its population across most of its range since 1990. In 2022, the IUCN moved it from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered, one category short of Extinct in the Wild. Along the Florida Coral Reef, it was declared functionally extinct in 2020.

A study published by Neely and colleagues in 2025 counted just 23 surviving colonies in the entire state, most with living tissue smaller than a golf ball, and too scattered to reproduce.

Yet, in their first full year of surveys, the Roatán team located healthy colonies. Velvet Teos, who coordinates the programme across Honduras, says those colonies are now treated as priority sites for conservation and genetic protection.

“Most importantly, the project generated critical information for the Roatán Marine Park, including the discovery of healthy pillar coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus) colonies that now serve as priority sites for conservation and genetic protection,” she explains.

But nobody finds a relict population of a collapsing species by simply hoping. Efforts like this require somebody to be in the water – at fixed sites – repeatedly. There to record what can be found.