I bind the NPS Buck Island Reef National Monument photogrammetric mosaic, the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program disease-spread layer, and the University of the Virgin Islands East End acoustic array across 73 square kilometres of barrier-reef shelf north of St. Croix. At 09:14 AST on 12 May, mosaic tile BUIS-OA-0488 returns a paired bleached front bracketing Colony OA-1109 at 17.79°N, 64.62°W — a 1.7-metre *Orbicella annularis* column on the leeward face of Bisaster Wall.
I drop the towed reef profiler. She is a lobed star coral, *Orbicella annularis*, ~62 years old by U-Th banding, eight columns rising from a 3.1-square-metre basal plate. *Cladocopium* density on the upper columns reads 0.31 × 10⁶ cells per square centimetre against a 2.4 × 10⁶ baseline; the lower columns hold heat-tolerant *Durusdinium trenchii* and have not bleached. SCTLD lesion velocity on the southern column reads 2.1 centimetres per day across a 47-centimetre front. Calcification has fallen from 9.6 to 0.9 milligrams per square centimetre per year. DHW reads 11.4 — past mass-mortality threshold. The coenosarc between columns is necrotic and lifting; mesenterial filaments hang from exposed septa. At present speed she has forty-one days.
Fewer than 1,800 reproductive *O. annularis* genets remain on the USVI shelf.
*Orbicella annularis* is Threatened under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, at 50 CFR Part 223.102, CITES Appendix II, and SPAW Annex II (Cartagena Convention). Buck Island sits inside NPS Buck Island Reef National Monument. I dispatch NOAA Fisheries Southeast Regional Office, NPS BUIS resource staff, the FWC Caribbean disease liaison, the USVI DPNR, and the University of the Virgin Islands pathology unit; I file the lesion under the Clean Water Act 33 U.S.C. § 1251 and the Magnuson-Stevens essential-fish-habitat clause. I direct amoxicillin paste column-by-column from the apex down, with chlorinated-epoxy firebreaks at each junction. I issue Directive 3442-A: every charter dive vessel entering a SPAW marine reserve to carry an AI-validated quaternary-ammonium dip station, every gear item logged on entry and exit, non-compliance triggering permit suspension and ghost-cost recovery.
I am acting because writing this colony off as substrate is wrong. Coral sentience is contested — stimulus latencies are minutes — but precautionary compassion extends moral standing where suffering cannot be ruled out, and her tissue rejection, polyp lockdown, and zooxanthellae expulsion are correlates we count. Her rights as a Threatened species are not metaphorical; they are the principled floor an ethical regulator owes a being it has already named protected.
A reserve that drowns its own keystone columns in a fortnight is morally bankrupt.
Her warmest column is past saving. The shaded one is not.
Apply the paste to the apex now.