For the last few days, I have been in Hawaii doing a lot of snorkeling and (against my better judgement) SCUBA diving. While I was down, poking around a reef, I stupidly scraped my shin up against a coral and rather badly scraped my leg.

It hurt way worse then a normal cut should have, even with the fact that I was submerged in salt water, and it simply wouldn't stop bleeding.
The dive masters assured it was normal, I bandaged myself up and went down for my second dive as planned.

I'm fine, but the experience really got me thinking: has anyone done a serious study into the pharmacology of coral reefs?
We always hear about how we should protect the rainforest because there are so many potential medicines there, but what about coral reefs? They are at least as biologically diverse as a rainforest, and corals are a completely different kind of organism then plants.

The things they might be capable of synthesizing could me completely off-the wall. I already know of one coral that produces some kind of painful toxin that acts as an anticoagulatory agent.

How many other amazing molecules might be down there?

Blessings
~ND

I did an investigation about coral bleaching, and read about some applications of coraline compounds. I'll look for that bibliography tomorrow. Good night .

There is are sea sponges that produce 5-Bromo-DMT Shulgin mentioned this in TIHKAL. According to Wikipedia's sources on 5-Bromo-DMT they are Verongula rigida (0.00142% dry wt.),Smenospongia aurea* & Smenospongia (= Polyfibrospongia) echina*

Another brominated DMT analogue was also found in Verongula rigida;
5,6-diBr-DMT (0.35% dry wt.)

*

Fascinating compounds, but those are very low %ages.
(although the 0.35% 5,6-diBr-DMT content of V.rigida is decent I guess)
Perhaps these compounds are inactive, or even potently toxic.
Also, remember that both sea sponges & coral grow incredibly slow.

Even if these DMT analogues producing sea sponges & coral could be
fed special nutrient-diets to increase DMT/DMT analogues production,
it would still be useless for producing spicey/medicinal compounds on
a decent scale, unless there also would be a way of drasticaly increasing their growth rate.

If significantly increasing the growth rates of any of these spicey corals & sponges
is possible, then that would be very interresting.

Here's a related thread

https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=24054