MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — Right now, Earth is hotter than it’s ever been in recorded history, with record breaking temperatures across the globe, including our ocean.
South Florida is in the grips of a marine heatwave further threatening our fast-disappearing coral reefs, which are still recovering from the worst mass bleaching event two summers ago.
This as scientists race to protect the corals we have left and try to restore all those we’ve lost.
It was on a sweltering summer morning that Local 10 News’ Louis Aguirre joined a team of volunteers from Rock the Ocean and scientists from the University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef program on a coral restoration mission.
An effort even more urgent after recent data revealed sea surface temperatures have skyrocketed in South Florida, with surface temps recorded at 97 degrees in parts of Florida Bay.
“Miami has been feeling that heat stress for actually three years straight,” said Dalton Hesley, Coral Restoration Ecologist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School.
The conditions are eerily reminiscent of the extremely hot summer of 2023, when South Florida experienced the worst coral bleaching event in recorded history.
And while so far there haven’t been any reports of widespread beaching in the Florida Keys, Coral Morphologic’s Colin Foord, who runs the Coral City Cam out of Government Cut, observed about 25% of the corals at Port Miami have bleached.
“We’re ground zero for the coral crisis,” said Hesley.
It’s another potential blow to our reefs still recovering from decades of decline.
Since the 1970’s, Florida reefs have lost more than 90% of their coral cover.
“Increasing ocean temperatures from global warming, hurricanes, disease, there’s been a suite of stressors that have really decimated our reefs to the point that they’re on the brink,” Hesley said.
Restoration missions like this one are critical.
They won’t bring back all the lost corals, but scientists are hopeful this will help chart the way towards bioengineering the reefs of tomorrow with the surviving corals and their resilient DNA leading the way.
“We can learn from those still here, integrate that into research and restoration to give them a fighting chance,” said Hesley.
Paradise Reef is located about three miles off the coast of Key Biscayne. It’s also the site of Rescue a Reefs’ coral nursery, an underwater farm growing baby corals so that they can mature and be outplanted onto the living reef.
Young critically endangered staghorn corals hang from metal trees.
Aguirre joined the volunteers to first scrub the structures clean.
“These trees get overgrown with algae, barnacles, sponges, you name it,” said Hesley. “So if we’re not there to actually clean them, they’re going to get overgrown. And we want these to be healthy habitats for the corals themselves.”
Next the coral’s were harvested, cutting the overgrown staghorns, collecting fragments that were later outplant onto the wild reef, just a few hundred feet away.
“We easily planted over 150 staghorn corals, a threatened species today back onto the reef to really fill in this restoration site, a big feat,” said Hesley.
Over the past 10 years, Rescue a Reef has restored some 2,000 corals to the local site alone, but there’s much more work that needs to be done.
Just three weeks prior, a groundbreaking pilot program was launched to help bring back Florida’s lost elkhorn coral.
“It’s the first time ever that it’s been permitted and we’ve gone ahead and outplanted,” said Dr. Andrew Baker, a marine biologist with the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School.
The baby elkhorn fragments recently outplanted at a Miami reef are actually the spawn of super heat resistant corals from Honduras.
“This was the first time to take steps to try to restore Florida’s Elkhorn corals with corals that had been sourced from outside of Florida,” said Baker.
Last year, UM scientists traveled to Tela Bay in Honduras, where they harvested fragments from these extra tough specimens that were then cross bred with local elkhorn corals in a lab at the Florida Aquarium.
The baby super corals, if they survive, could be the pioneers of the future.
“We’re going to see how well these do over the next few months, in particular, over the course of a warm summer, to see if they are more thermally tolerant, as we hope, and better able to deal with the changing conditions in Florida’s corals reef,” said Baker.
And together with Miami’s resilient urban corals, they could hold the key to saving our reefs.
“They are tough, so they are special, and we’re trying to better understand why, so we can then integrate that into gardening and restoration,” said Hesley. “So we’re building that super coral reef.”
Scientists underscore that no matter how resilient we make our reefs, unless we address the root cause behind the coral crisis, which is climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, to get those under control coral reefs don’t have a chance.
Rescue a Reef just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. The goal is to get as many citizen scientists as they can out of the water to fall in love with corals and help restore them.
You don’t have to be a scuba diver, you can also snorkel and help out.
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