Off the southern coast of Singapore, where some of the world's busiest shipping lanes press against fragile marine ecosystems, a quiet experiment has yielded a quietly profound answer. In 2018, Singapore's port authority and national parks board placed eight concrete frames on bare seafloor near Small Sister's Island — planting nothing, engineering nothing — and simply waited. By 2022, two of those unplanted structures had drawn 95 coral colonies from seven distinct genera, suggesting that the ocean, when offered even the simplest foothold, retains a deep memory of how to restore itself.