Gates explained that Kaneohe Bay had been the inspiration for the super-coral project. For much of the twentieth century, it had been used as a dump for sewage. By the 1970s, its reefs had mostly collapsed. Seaweed had taken over, and the water in the bay had turned an eerily bright green. But then a sewage-treatment plant came online. Later, the state teamed up with the Nature Conservancy and the University of Hawaii to devise a contraption—basically, a barge equipped with giant vacuum hoses—to suck algae off the seabed. Gradually, the reefs started to revive.
