For this week’s Please Explain we explore the critical role coral reefs play in marine life and how they’re threatened by “coral bleaching," which is a sign of mass coral death. We’ll be joined by Jeff Orlowski, director of the new Netflix documentary “Chasing Coral," along with Ruth Gates, a scientist who appears in the film and is the director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

"Chasing Coral" is out now on Netflix.