In Layton Florida, marine biologist Emily Becker and volunteers race to aid the coral reef off Florida’s coast as global warming wreaks havoc with the coral beds. “People jumped into action really quickly, as best as they could,” Becker said. Rescue groups have been working in the intense heat for weeks to collect as many specimens as they can in order to save the third largest coral reef in the world.
The warming waters caused 100% bleaching on parts of the reef, resulting in the corals losing their zooxanthellae algae. The algae make their food and gives them color. If the zooxanthellae doesn’t recover from the bleaching, the coral dies.
“We’re already seeing not just bleaching, but actual coral death out on the reef because the temperatures were so hot, and we can’t afford to lose more of our reef.”
said Cynthia Lewis, director of the Keys Marine Lab.
Coral bleaching is a natural process that occurs when waters heat up, but Lewis stated that this case is more urgent for marine life, coastal protection, and Florida’s economy. The corals “don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “They’re literally sitting, stewing in the water out there in these hot, hot temperatures.”
Coral reefs are the first defense against erosion and flooding from storms. It helps with commercial fishing, and supports the tourism industry, and they nurture “such an amazing amount of diversity and life” in the ocean around them, Lewis said. “In a normal situation, they’re like the rainforests of the ocean. They’re incredibly important.”
The world’s oceans have been hot since April due to the burning of fossil fuels, and from the natural phenomena El Niño. The coral bleaching happened quickly as the water temperature rose in July. “We got kicked in the teeth because it happened so fast in the Lower Keys. I mean, within a week,” said Michael Echevarria, president of the nonprofit Reef Renewal USA.
Reef Renewal initially worked to move the endangered coral into land-based facilities. Recently they’ve saved coral in their underwater nurseries in shallow water by moving to deeper, cooler water.
Reef Renewal founder Ken Nedimyer said coral bleaching is “hard to watch and hard to experience” and said his group knew that coral stress would increase due to climate change but didn’t think it would come this soon. “There’s a lot of people that think this isn’t real, that climate change is not real, and that the world is not warming up. And I don’t care what they say, it’s real. I’m living it right now and I’ve lived down here and done this for a long time,” he said. “And I’ve never seen this.”
At the Keys Marine Lab, the collected pieces of coral were placed in cooling trays that hold between 40-400 gallons of seawater. The 85-degree water makes for “much happier coral,” Becker said.
“We’ve seen some coral that have been really stressed offshore, come back into our tables and recover already,” she said. “They’re already getting color back. So that’s really encouraging to see that.”
This work goes beyond saving the coral reef. Becker and others are studying different types of coral to see which ones survive temperature, stress, and disease, with hopes to “build a better reef with more resilient corals,” she said.