MIAMI – For decades, scientists have warned about the imminent catastrophic impacts that a rapidly changing ocean will have on coral reefs around the world.
This past July, South Florida got a front row seat, as we experienced the worst mass bleaching event ever recorded.
As temperatures off the coast reached into the triple digits, corals in South Florida, the Caribbean, and parts of Central America turned pale white.
Bleaching occurs when corals start to lose the symbiotic algae that feed them, they begin to lose color and pale, turning bleach white as they slowly starve to death.
“The Earth is warming up too quickly, the corals are not able to adapt on their own quickly enough, and they need our help,” University of Miami professor Andrew Baker told us. “Many of the corals that bleached in July and August have now died. Especially a lot of the Staghorn and Elkhorn corals. There are a few survivors left as we move towards moving north towards Miami Dade, the survivorship is a bit better, there are more corals alive. But the situation is still pretty bleak and we’re not out the woods just yet.”
Baker is just one of the hundreds of scientists and academics who gathered for ReeFLorida, a coral symposium sponsored by the Frost Science Museum in Miami earlier this month. This event was the first of its kind for the Frost Museum and their National Coral Reef Conservancy Program. It was also the first time many of these coral researchers saw each other face-to-face following the bleaching event.
Shannon Jones, the curator of ecology and environmental restoration at the Frost Science Museum, explained that the message of the three-day event was not one of pain, but rather one of hope.
“It was a devastating summer, and now everyone is working together to try to get to a place so we’re going to be ready for when it comes again,” Jones said.
Other scientists in attendance, like Ian Enochs have found inspiration in the survivors of the bleaching event – hoping that could hold the key to propagating the reefs of the future.
“The fact that they were able to experience so much stress and still be able to live is really quite remarkable. It’s something that we can learn from and try to use to hopefully help replenish some of the other reefs, some of the other corals,” Enochs, the leader of the NOAA AOML Coral Program, explained.
Urban corals found in Port Miami and Government Cut have proven to be especially encouraging. Although many of these corals did bleach severely during the scorching summer, their recovery has been staggering.
“The next month, 30 days later, fully recovered. They had all of their color back. They were feeding, death was minimal. So they seem to fare very well,” Michael Studivan of the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab said. “They’re amazing. We are surrounded by death and destruction. And these corals inside the port are not dying. They are thriving.”
It was just three months before the bleaching event when NOAA published a study based on research from Studivan about the miraculous resilience of these corals.
Now breeding from these super corals is among the most critical work being done at land-based facilities like the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School.
Andrew Baker leads this Noah’s Ark, where different species of the hardiest of corals are grown and fostered until they can be outplanted back on the reefs.
“So there are ways we can build this thermal tolerance and heat stress resistance into the population. We just need some time,” Baker explained.
But beating the clock will not be easy. Our oceans have been increasingly getting warmer and restoration efforts must ramp up to keep pace.
“We have the science that suggests there is a way out of this. This buys us time. It buys us a few decades for us to get the climate crisis under control,” said Baker.
Symposiums like ReeFLorida at the Frost Science Museum help to fuel the mission. The event served not only as a space to exchange ideas and the latest data, but also as a pep rally.
“The amount of motivation that I’ve seen from some of the smartest people I know, It’s pretty amazing,” Ian Enochs said.
Studivan explained that it’s these sorts of meetings of minds that supercharge the scientists, even when the work ahead is so daunting.
“This tells us it’s not time to give up,” he said. “There are smart people that are willing to do whatever it takes to save these ecosystems. And I am humbled to be a part of that experience.”
Beyond the conference, the fight to protect the reefs continues in our backyards. The Department of Defense has joined forces with the University of Miami to build hybrid reefs of concrete and coral as a possible solution to protect coastal cities from flooding and erosion. The project is estimated at $20 million dollars. A small price tag to pay to protect the estimated $375 billion dollars worth of economic goods and services provided by our coral reefs each year.
The ReeFlorida symposium will be back at the Frost Museum next year. To learn more information about the event click here.
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