STEVE CURWOOD: John Ryan is a journalist who travels the world looking for a good story and a good time. Recently, he found both on a small island just off the coast of Indonesia.

RYAN: I admit it, I went to Gililawa Laut Island for the sex, but I promise, I only wanted to watch. Let me explain. Gililawa Laut is a harsh and uninhabited speck of land in Indonesia's Komodo National Park. But just beyond its blistering shores are some of the world's richest coral reefs, home to some of the most spectacular and bizarre sexual events in nature.

The sex lives of corals were largely a mystery until a moonlit night in 1981 when scientists first observed a mass spawning of corals on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Corals are usually about as animated as rocks, but on that night they were spewing millions of eggs and sperm into the sea, turning the crystal clear waters into a sort of multi-color underwater snowstorm. Australian scientists now know that on a few special nights a year, up to 40 coral species, most of them hermaphrodites, simultaneously blast pink, purple and green packets of spawn, in living blizzards of reproduction. The spawn form slicks on the surface so big and bright they're visible from outer space.

To see corals spawning, you have to be brave enough to swim in the ocean at night, and exceedingly lucky: Away from the Great Barrier Reef, scientists still know very little about the timing of coral spawning. But I dove above the reefs of Gililawa Laut to see another kind of sex spectacle. These reefs are known to scientists and fishermen as a