Coral Larvae Dispersal in Ocean Currents

Coral reefs are connected not by roots or cables but by the drift of microscopic larvae carried on ocean currents — which reef "seeds" which is decided by physics as much as biology. This simulator releases a cohort of coral larvae from a source reef and tracks each one as a Lagrangian particle in a current field built from a steerable mean flow plus two mesoscale eddies, with turbulent diffusion added as a random walk. Larvae pass through a pre-competency phase before they can settle, then have a finite competency window and background mortality rate during which they may stochastically settle onto one of several outlying reef patches, be swept out of the domain, or simply run out of energy and die — the same Lagrangian particle-tracking approach used in real coral-reef connectivity research to plan marine protected area networks.