To say that you're growing a century-old coral
back to life sounds like it's science fiction.
Most people don't realize the importance
of the Florida Reef Tract to South Florida,
to the tune that it's a multi-billion dollar value.
Coral reefs are less than one percent
of the bottom of the ocean yet
they account for a good portion of all of our fisheries.
It's the habitat, it's the underwater forrest and jungle.
If we lose the jungle, we lose all the organisms in it.
Regretfully, I've lived during a time where I looked at
the two main corals that were out there on the reef,
staghorn and elkhorn,
and watched them go from 98 percent coverage
of the reef to less than 2 percent.
But now we know that we can have an alternative.
There is good news.
People don't have to say it's all going downhill.
We can make it go back.
Ten years ago, I was really looking at
just two more years in order to retire.
Once we saw that there is this
new technology for restoration,
I had to stay working and see this through.
I really feel like a gardener in a greenhouse
that is producing hundreds of trees
by way of tissue culture.
We're producing thousands of corals
by microfragmentation.
The technique is basically cutting them into
as small a piece as possible.
Something happens to this coral when it's broken
that stimulates rapid healing and good growth.
So each of these corals were started by starting it at
a piece of about this size,
and as you can see in this tank it doesn't take long
before in just a few months, they're already growing
and multiplying 25 to 40 times the speed that has
been recorded for coral growth in the past.
Most of these are now filled out,
and are ready for outplanting back onto the reef.
Most people doing coral restoration have all worked
with the fast-growing branching corals,
but everybody forgot the slow-growing massive corals,
the reef-building corals.
Some of these are living centuries.
This one grows about a millimeter on each side,
about the size of a head of a pin every year.
If this were alive and you came back next year,
you might not even notice that it had grown.
Ten years ago, we almost needed a coral self-help group
by scientists because things were going so dismal.
We were disappointed on how slow early growth
from an egg or a larvae really is.
This disc with the pink and purple color
has a couple of brown spots in the center.
Each of those is an actual baby coral
that is almost a half a year old.
To see that it took three years to get to the size that we
thought would be something worthwhile doing
something with, that's what got me disappointed,
that I literally took it off the higher level of the aquarium
and put it on the bottom of the aquarium thinking that
this was no longer a process worth pursuing.
And when I went to move that one, it broke.
And I thought for sure
that really was going to stress and hurt that coral.
The few little polyps left behind in a pile of
broken calcium carbonate skeleton.
I think my statement was: These things are toast.
They're not going to make it.
Two weeks later, I went to check on it,
and the piece that had the dime-sized hole in it
had completely grown back to the size
that it was previously.
And that sized dime took two years to produce
from a larvae.
That was incredible, so much so
that even though the tank that it came from was only
a few steps away, I literally ran back to the other tank
where the three little polyps were left behind.
They had also grown back, multiplied to about
a dozen or more polyps,
and were also back to the size of a nickel or a dime.
So then became the science
from the astonishment and the accident
is to then cut those again,
simulate that one more time,
and so we basically were on the road to just say:
How small can we go?
And the answer to that is we can cut it
into just one polyp.
These really all are brothers and sisters.
They'll actually start growing into each other,
and fusing back as one piece.
This is that same style that was started by
four similar pieces
that just nine months later grew together and
fused into a coral
that normally would have been a 15 to 25-year-old coral.
We've lost 25 to 40 percent of the world's corals
in just our lifetime.
If we keep up this way and don't do anything about it,
we may lose the other half of it just within
the next 100 years.
The major stressor is this elevated temperatures
of our ocean seawaters,
and the ever-increasing amount of C02
into the water to make it more acidic.
Those two big factors are really the factors
that will make or break
our coral reefs in the future.
This system actually simulates different temperatures
and different pH levels of the water from what we are
forecast that may be in place in 50 years from now,
and then also in 100 years from now.
We'll see from the corals of the two species that are
in here how they tolerate the future oceans.
We've already noticed that of the different genetic
strains of each species, there are many strains that are
much more resistant and tolerant of
higher temperatures and therefore diseases.
So the work over the next few years will be to watch
all the conditions to see which strains are the
best for surviving in the future.
These 10,000 corals, if they survive for two
more years will be ready to break into small pieces
again and each one produce maybe another 100
corals ready to plant.
Before long, we're talking hundreds of thousands,
and before long we're actually using the word
potentially planting a million corals in our lifetime.
We are now producing corals faster than
we can get permission to put them back out.
Somebody said now:
For 10 million dollars, could you take the elkhorn
corals off the endangered species list?
I'd say yes.
It can be done, and it can be done in the next few years.
How incredible?
There's no reason as a worldwide
we can't replace these corals,
and get our oceans back the way they used to be.