I saw a really interesting program on PBS about the earths magnetic poles and how we are on the verge of a swap of magnetic north. So South will be North and North will be South. I believe that some of the things that are being blamed on pollution such as the hole in the ozone layer at the poles may be more likely related to the weakening of the earths magnetic field. Not many people carry compasses anymore but my truck has one built in and on the move out here I think I experienced a switch in the magnetic field. For some reason my compass was reading all wrong(no I wasn't lost). For some reason for a couple of hundred of miles of road that I know runs east/west I was going west but the compass was reading east. It has never happened again so I doubt it was a electrical problem.
The program had shown that by going deeper into older layers of rock they can tell that the magnetic poles have changed lots of times in the earths history. It was really amazing to me as I had never heard anything about that sort of thing before.
And just to relate it back to the topic of corals it is very similar in that there far more things that we don't know about corals or the earth than we know about them. I heard Eric Bornemann speak out in Oklahoma and he freely admitted that hobbyists are one of the greatest sources of discovery about corals. Coral research in the wild is really in its very early stages since Scuba gear was invented in the 1970's and hobbyists pay very close attention to their tanks for hours and hours at a time. It is hard to stay under water in the Ocean for as long as is need to get a great deal of information about corals but in the aquarium you can observe corals pretty much all the time.
Then he told a story about a long day of diving out in the South Pacific and how he got back up to the boat exhausted and was laying on the deck of the boat and the thought occured to him that his job was to go diving in the South Pacific something that most people pay lots of money to go do and he was getting paid for it. He told it a lot better but that was the jist of the whole thing.