Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve

This guide to Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve in Honolulu opens with the crowds that once packed this volcanic cove by the thousands in a single day in the nineteen eighties, trampling the coral beneath them. It traces the bay's royal Hawaiian past, the fish-feeding habit that undid decades of instinct, and the restrictions the city imposed starting in nineteen ninety. Then comes an accidental experiment: a closure in twenty twenty that let rangers see how fast the reef could recover.