In 2006, an artist installed 75 human figures off Grenada after a hurricane damaged its reefs; corals later colonized them alongside parrotfish, shrimp and fireworms

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan passed through Grenada, stripping large parts of coral from the reef that borders Molinere Bay. Two years later, sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, letting his artwork work its magic, placed 75 concrete human figures on that same seabed, believing that art could speed up what nature would otherwise take decades to rebuild on its own. Two decades later, a study suggested that a version of that belief may have been justified. A 2024 study titled 'A Report on the Artificial Reef Use in Grenada, West Indies,' published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, found that a separate set of concrete artificial reefs built within the same protected bay developed coral cover closely resembling nearby natural reefs within about two years of placement. This may have been the vision Taylor had in mind.

A reef born from disaster

Molinere Bay was never intended to be an art gallery. Taylor built the underwater park in response to the damage Hurricane Ivan caused to the reef in this area, leaving too little hard structure left for coral to grow on. Taylor used pH-neutral, textured concrete to create the sculptures, giving coral polyps a surface on which to settle. According to Grenada's Tourism Authority, the park opened its doors to tourists in May 2006, having placed 75 statues of people on the seabed occupying an area of about 800 square meters, at depths of five to eight meters. It has since expanded, and it now sits on National Geographic's list of 25 Wonders of the World.

How coral finds a new home

Watching bare concrete disappear under coral is not instant magic, and usually follows a fairly predictable pattern. It's worth being clear that the following data doesn't come from Taylor's statues themselves: to follow this process, researchers from Wisconsin Lutheran College studied a different concrete structure in the same Moliniere-Beauséjour Marine Protected Area, a set of artificial reef "pyramids" built separately by local conservation volunteers. The study found that the fire coral, a fast-spreading species that can quickly regenerate after storm damage, tends to be one of the first settlers to establish itself on any newly formed concrete structure in Grenadian waters before other types of coral start to settle there. The study also found that these artificial reefs had far less harmful algae than natural reefs and more coralline algae, which helps coral larvae attach and grow. Thus, a properly constructed concrete reef in this bay may support coral growth better, at least initially, than some nearby natural reefs.

Parrotfish, shrimp and fireworms move in

Coral is only half the story. Divers visiting the Molinere Bay today report spotting parrotfish grazing steadily across the sculptures, as well as shrimp hiding in the crevices and fireworms crawling over the surfaces. Their presence is more important than it might seem at first. Researchers writing in Nature Communications reconstructed the 3,000-year history of Caribbean reefs based on fossilized fish teeth, corals, and urchins. The researchers found that parrotfish abundance was a key driver of coral reef growth, not the other way around. The concrete substrate gives coral a surface to settle on in the first place, but that's only step one: parrotfish graze on algae that would otherwise smother young coral, so a steady population of them is one of the clearest signs that a reef, whether natural or artificial, is actually functioning rather than just looking pretty.

Why the reef was important in the first place

Grenada had good reason to want its coral back quickly. Research published in the Journal of Environmental Management studied Grenville Bay on Grenada's coast directly and found that healthy coral reefs there helped keep the shoreline stable by dissipating wave energy before it reached land, while reef degradation elsewhere in the same bay was linked to severe erosion and flooding. The destruction of the coral reefs in Molinere Bay by Hurricane Ivan meant the coastline lost some of its natural protection. Reconstructing that protective wall, even if it was not biological, was something for Molinere Bay to start with.

A quiet success story, with limits

This doesn’t mean that concrete statues can totally replace a living reef. The Grenada pyramid study is careful to note that the diversity of corals on the artificial structures it studied was still lower than on nearby natural reefs, and that longer-term monitoring is needed to know how they do over decades. But as an emergency response to hurricane damage, the Molinere Bay sculptures have achieved an unusual conservation outcome. They took disaster recovery and turned it into an ecosystem that actually works and that people want to visit. Two decades after the first figures were submerged, they are barely recognizable as human forms, and that is exactly the point.