Raquel Peixoto

My career in coral microbiology began as an unexpected detour. I actually started as a plant and soil microbiologist, working with beneficial microbes to help crops thrive. That early work planted the seed for everything that came later. When I eventually shifted to marine systems, I realized that the principles guiding plant probiotics could transform coral conservation. But translating this idea into the coral world was not easy. Reviewers, editors, and sponsors called it impossible, risky, or “too unconventional.” I believed in it so strongly that I funded part of the first proof-of-concept myself, from my own pocket. “Stubbornness”, as it turns out, can be a scientific strategy, and a new field of research was created.

Maybe the shift was inevitable. I grew up by the ocean in Rio de Janeiro; I’m a surfer, a scuba diver, and – fittingly, my surname means “little fish.” My children and husband also dive and surf, so moving from soils to seas felt more like returning home.

Five years ago, I turned a long-held dream into reality: the Coral Probiotics Village – an underwater experimental laboratory designed to test probiotics on live corals in the real world. The “village” has three gates like our university, streets like a small underwater city, and even an irrigation system engineered to deliver probiotics. I still remember the moment we found the perfect site after days of diving. My team surfaced from two different dive sites with the same smile: “This is it.” It matched exactly the place I had envisioned. This dream-turned-reality is now accelerating an entire field and offering hope for reef resilience. It reminds me why I do what I do: because science can rewrite the fate of ecosystems – when we dare to imagine what doesn’t exist yet.

One of the most defining moments of my career happened during a record heatwave in the Red Sea. My team and I were diving at a reef site I knew intimately – our underwater laboratory, normally bursting with life. But that day, it was silent, pale, and collapsing under extreme temperatures. Watching an ecosystem I love lose the battle against climate change in real time was devastating. I surfaced feeling helpless, and I allowed myself to fully feel the grief. I cried that night. But the next morning, I decided that one night was all I could spare. We have no time to waste.

That experience became a turning point. Instead of letting the loss define the future, we chose to transform it. We are now restoring that reef, but not simply rebuilding it – we are reinventing how restoration is done. We are strengthening the science, documenting every step, and developing scalable, multi-taxa restoration paired with microbial therapies. By integrating probiotics with large-scale ecological restoration, we are creating an “all-hands-on-deck” approach designed to rebuild reefs that can actually withstand the world we’re heading into.

This year, we tested our coral probiotics again, directly in the field nurseries we installed to restore the degraded reef. Corals that received probiotics were significantly healthier. In a parallel experiment, probiotics also increased the survival of other reef organisms threefold. Seeing life return where we once saw near-collapse has been extraordinary.

These moments – grief on one dive, hope on the next ones – reshaped my understanding of exploration. It is not only about discovering new worlds and ecosystems, but also protecting the ones that are disappearing before our eyes.