In Virginia Key, the University of Miami works to save our state's corals. It’s an effort being made during the recent heat wave.
“It’s record-breaking for 17 days straight, and what we are seeing is stress in the corals,” shares Cameron McMath, the Facilities Manager at UM’s Rosenstiel School.
Extreme heat, earlier than expected, is causing corals to die off by the hundreds. The University of Miami is teaming up with other labs to collect as many as possible.
“People don’t think of it as an animal, they think of it as a rock or this plant, but really it’s an animal just like a jellyfish,” explains McMath. “And we need to do what we can to protect it.”
Coral bleaching is when the corals get so stressed they shed off their algae, not allowing them to perform photosynthesis and get their energy. Their immune systems become weak, and they slowly die off.
And it has already begun in the Florida Keys.
According to MOTE Marine Laboratory, out of 44 colonies studied, 18 were already bleached, and 21 were partially bleached.
This is why this team in Miami is trying to get ahead of what could be catastrophic.
“We are hoping for a few days of bad weather, which we don’t normally hope for; we need to have this anomaly of it going up and up to hopefully level off and decrease,” explains Associate Professor Diego Lirman. “A couple of degrees here and there makes a huge difference.”
The crews are hoping to collect corals from a range of different species to be able to restore as many as possible. They will also breed other species to see how they can make corals more resilient.
Tuesday, they are focused on two species. The boats are bringing in 400 colonies of just one species daily.
The corals are placed in tanks filled with iodine solutions for 15 minutes, killing off any unwanted bacteria.
They then are rinsed in fresh saltwater, tagged, and then placed in these large tanks filled with ocean water that’s temperature controlled.
The goal is once the ocean has cooled, these corals can go back to their home.
“Best case scenario is that we did all of this work for nothing. So, the corals do well there, they do well on land, and all we did is spend a few days using our resources to move corals for no reason,” shares Lirman.
He furthers, “But it looks to be a bad year, so in this case, I think we are doing the right thing.”
