In mid-July 2023, heat-stressed corals in the southern Florida Keys began bleaching—expelling their food-producing algal partners—amid the hottest water temperatures ever documented in the region during the satellite record (dating back to 1985).
In mid-July 2023, heat-stressed corals in the southern Florida Keys began bleaching—expelling their food-producing algal partners—amid the hottest water temperatures ever documented in the region during the satellite record (dating back to 1985). As weeks of heat stress have continued to accumulate, bleaching and death have become more widespread, raising fears of a mass mortality event on the region’s already fragile reefs.
NOAA and its state agency, university, and non-profit partners in the Mission: Iconic Reef project—Coral Restoration Foundation, Reef Renewal USA, Mote Marine Laboratory, University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Reef Institute, and the Florida Aquarium—are responding to the crisis with a variety of measures that they hope will safeguard the Reef’s remaining live corals, protect corals being grown in underwater nurseries, and preserve live fragments of all genetically unique staghorn and elkhorn coral that remain on Florida’s Coral Reef. Reef conservation teams have already relocated thousands of nursery coral colonies to tanks at the Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Keys Marine Lab for rehabilitation and safekeeping, hopefully for just the short-term.
Read more at: NOAA
Elkhorn coral fragments rescued from ocean-based nurseries in a holding tank at Keys Marine Laboratory. (Photo Credit: NOAA)
