In the Spring of 2008 an eighty-four foot pleasure boat departed from Ft. Lauderdale
bound for the Caribbean. Thirty miles south of Miami, it strayed from
marked navigation channels into the shallow waters of Biscayne National Park.
Suddenly, running at full speed it collided with a coral reef near Elliot Key.
Corals, sponges and sea fans were instantly obliterated as the boats twin propellers plowed
through the reef. The engines were disabled and the powerless
vessel drifted in the wind until grounding on a second reef.
Here, the wind and waves rocked the boat on its hull, shattering the ancient coral mounds
and pounding the reef into rubble. A coral reef that had taken centuries to grow...
was destroyed in just moments. Two and a half years later, coral researchers
and resource managers are searching for solutions to help the oceans' declining coral reefs.
Can new technologies and naturally occurring biological mechanisms help restore the lost
coral communities? And can ecological balance be returned to Florida's coral reefs?
Major funding for this program was provided by The Batchelor Foundation, encouraging people
to preserve and protect America's underwater resources.
Biscayne National Park is an undersea garden filled with multi-colored sponges, corals
and sea fans. At the northern extent of the Florida Keys reef tract its sea grass beds,
coral reefs and mangrove shorelines cover more than 170,000 acres, a gem in the National
Park system, but an area with a history of damaging boat groundings.
Corals in Biscayne National Park and on a global scale are in a serious state of decline
due to stresses like climate change, disease outbreaks and overfishing.
Since the late 1970s close to ninety-eight per cent of staghorn and elkhorn corals have
disappeared from the reefs in Florida and the Caribbean.
Because corals are having such a difficult time persisting, resource managers want to
restore boating impacts like the 2008 grounding site in the park.
When the vessel grounded it crushed up the surface of the reef into a rubble field and
we're trying to use a combination of adhesives to stabilize that rubble. We're collecting
the rubble into mounds like this and like this and we'll be using a combination of cement
and natural sponges that are found right here on the reef to bind this rubble to stabilize
it through time. Right now the rubble mounds are just in the process of being put together.
We're installing rebar stakes like this that will help us monitor them through time and
we'll be looking at things such as coral recruitment, the stability of the mounds themselves, if
they change in size and shape and height, and we'll probably monitor these for a period
of at least five years. Researchers at the University of Miami have
developed one of the first underwater applications for mosaic imaging, a technique comparable
to aerial photography on the land. This technology will create useful perspectives of the coral
reef and grounding site in Biscayne National Park. The diver swims back and forth in a
lawnmower-like pattern recording overlapping images of the underwater landscape. Later,
at the university laboratory, a single seamless image of the reef is produced.
This is basically an unprecedented baseline in terms of the amount of information that you
can get in a very short amount of time. Three-dimensional images can be created over
time to show reef areas where corals grow best, the places where restoration is most
likely to succeed. New growths of soft corals and sponges are
returning to the grounding site, but the boats most damaging impacts are still evident.
The damage extends several hundreds of square meters and really there's no easy way to document
that. So, here we're able to use the video and the stills to really cover the entire area
both the affected area and also the community around it so that we know what this area should
look like when its fully restored. Coral reef restoration gained traction in
the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary with marine biologists like Harold Hudson,
The Reef Doctor, and Ken Nedimeyer. Hudson, a restoration
specialist for the sanctuary, perfected a design for reef modules that were used for
the structural repair of a large vessel grounding site, the Wellwood, on Molasses Reef near
Key Largo. Nedimeyer performed the biological restoration with transplanted corals grown
in his undersea nursery. His restoration plan was validated when it was discovered that
transplants on the reef were spawning several years sooner than expected.
I was real excited, I thought man, this is amazing because this is exactly what we've
been trying to say that were going to do which is re-establish these spawning populations
of corals. It brought a whole new life to the possibility of not just putting corals
back on the reef but re-establishing breeding populations that could then re-populate other
downstream areas. Nedimeyers coral nursery is the largest in
the country and a model for many coral aquaculturists. Here you encounter a hundred rows of coral
fragments mounted on concrete blocks. Each coral is attached to a disc with a label designating
its origin and genotype, or genetic properties. More than a thousand staghorn cuttings are
strung from six line nurseries suspended in the water column by floats and cross-tied
with horizontal lines. On a line nursery they grow down, they grow
to the side, they grow all different directions. And another thing thats nice about them, if
a turtle or a shark or a fish bumps against them on the line they just bounce out of the
way and they swing right back to where they were. If a turtle bumps against a coral thats
firmly mounted on a disc itll break it off. Nedimyer cultivates staghorn coral, one of
the principle reef building corals and one listed as threatened under the Endangered
Species Act. He cultivates them in his nursery for a year then transplants them to the reef.
One of the things we need to be doing is preserving the genetic diversity that we still have.
And if we dont preserve as much of that as possible right now we wont have anything to
work with in ten or fifteen years. Research Associate Tom Capo and colleagues
at the University of Miami's experimental hatchery are preserving the genetic diversity of orphaned
corals whose survival was threatened by storms, boat groundings and anchor pulls. Some were
recovered from the grounding site in Biscayne National Park. Researchers are trying to answer
questions about a destructive phenomenon known as coral bleaching.
Whats going on? Is it disease? Is it some sort of water quality parameter? And many
of these questions cannot be answered easily in the field. So the goal is to have a coral
genetic bank, a coral resource that we can provide genetically maintained strains of
coral to bona fide researchers around the world so that they can look at these problems,
at these issues, and look at them in a scientific way.
In a partnership between Biscayne National Park and the University of Miami, trained
volunteers assist Capo with a labor-intensive process known as fragmentation to produce
a large number of small coral specimens. You should have one ready for him now, I mean
he should not stop. Travertine plates are marked, drilled and
fitted with passive integrated transponders, or PIT tags, that will give each coral a unique
identity. The large corals are cut into fragments, each
about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The bottom surface is shaped on a tile saw. The
fragment is thoroughly dried, super-glued to a PIT tag plate and cataloged for future
reference. Half of the fragments will be transplanted
at the coral restoration site in Biscayne National Park, the other half will remain
at the facility for monitoring and lab studies to help Capo and coral researchers answer
another difficult question. How can we enhance all of this to make the
only reef tract in the continental United States a viable place rather than seeing it
deteriorate like its been doing over the past ten years?
One of Capo's research partners, Martin Moe, a marine biologist in the Florida Keys, believes
he has an answer. In 1983, there was this tremendous plague
and it hit only one organism. And that was the long-spined sea urchin, Diadema Antellerum
that occupied all the reefs of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Florida, they were all very densely
occupied by diadema. And diadema peformed the essential task of cleaning the algae off
the reefs and conditioning the substrate so that it would accept and encourage coral growth
and the growth of many kinds of fish and invertebrates. Within one year 98% of all the diadema antellerum
from the mouth of the Panama Canal all the way up to Bermuda were history, were toast.
They all died quickly. At first, divers like Ken Nedimeyer were happy
about the decline of the sharp-spined creatures. As much as I dont like getting stabbed by
them, I think they're important and I want to have them back.
Like sheep grazing in a pasture, diadema sea urchins graze the macroalgae that grow on
the reefs and inhibit coral reproduction. A lot of the problems are directly related
to the lack of sea urchins. If you fix all of the water quality issues
and fix all of these other things but you don't fix the sea urchin problem you're not
going to have a coral reef. Sea urchins play a really important role.
Ken and I came to the point of view that the loss of the diadema was critical to the decline
of the reefs. Now, our coral reef decline comes from many factors not just the loss
of diadema. But that is certainly one of the most critical elements because its the diadema
that maintain that balance between coral and algae growth.
With support from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, Nedimeyer and Moe did two
experimental reef studies where they re-introduced the diadema.
A year later, the findings were remarkable. Juvenile corals increased by more than 150%,
coralline algae, which encourages coral settlement and growth, was sharply higher, and macroalgae
was reduced from 11% to less than 2%.
I started with the Florida Board of Conservation Marine Laboratory back in 1962. Florida was
a very different place back then. I worked with the Keys and the Keys were magical. I
remember going out and diving around John Pennekamp area and there were huge stands
of elkhorn coral, palmatta, beautiful. And it was such a tremendous environment. And
when I came back in the late 90s the reef was so much different and it was so sad to
see what was a glorious coral environment just become for the most part a lot of algae
covered rocks. It seemed like the best thing that I could
do was to work with the diadema because nobody else was doing it and it was something essential
to do. Martin Moe is committed to perfecting the
technology to reproduce, or culture diadema in the laboratory. Today he begins a new culture
process, or run, by selecting diadema that are ready to spawn. Immersing them in a tub
of warm water stimulates the spawn. Oh yeah. Now thats a male. You can see the
white sperm there. Yes sir, thats a female. Weve got spawning first three. How about that?
OK, this is the product from the spawn. Apparently a male and a female both went which means
that I should have eggs in here. Oh yes, that is nice. I can see fertilization membranes
are present around every egg so we know we have had a good spawn. And we know we've got good eggs.
Out of, lets say, five million eggs that were spawned here, which is a pretty good estimate,
and out of those five million you'd probably be lucky if one, or two made it, in nature,
all the way through the process and became a juvenile. And then you'd probably be lucky if one
of those survived into adulthood, very lucky actually.
The following morning he counts the developing embryos.
The eggs hatch in about 18 to 24 hours, they become blastulas, they become
prisms which is the initial urchin shape. The embryos are transferred to three larvae
culture tanks where they will eat and grow for the next thirty-five to forty-five days.
But, unlike other types of invertebrates, diadema larvae will die if they settle on
the bottom of the tanks. Finding a method to mimic the natural ocean current to keep
the larvae in suspension had been Martin's biggest trial during his early culture attempts.
Maintaining a sterile environment had been another problem. Entire runs had failed in
the culture tanks. The weeks ahead will again test his system and the diadema's ability to
survive. Meanwhile, the fragmented corals from the
University of Miami have arrived at the grounding site in Biscayne National Park. Volunteer helpers
swim with buckets of cement and crates of tiles to the transplant areas. Another group
has re-attached broken pieces and transplanted nursery-raised coral to the site. And resource
managers are betting on the feasibility of a new restoration technique.
We're going to be using sponges to bind the rubble that was created by this grounding
incident and this is the first time we've tried this and to our knowledge the first time that sponges
have been used in an actual restoration project for this purpose.
Sponges are known to play an ecological role in binding rubble in a natural reef setting.
There's also evidence that coral will settle and grow more favorably on an area that's been
bound by sponges. Right here, we've marked a sponge where we cut
a fragment off yesterday. We've tagged and marked the parent colony so that we can track
it through time and see how that lesion heals just to make sure it's doing OK. The sponge
fragment that we took from there we've attached over in our sponge nursery. Each tile has
nine PVC trees. We attach one sponge fragment to each PVC tree. We cut these sponge fragments
off of the parent colonies that I showed you earlier. And we're trying to get the cut surface
in contact with the paver stone at least as closely as possible. Our colleagues have shown
that those cut surfaces bind to whatever they're in contact with, very quickly if all goes
well. So we hope to come back and see these sponges growing down onto the tiles and also
up starting to branch out. And the idea is that in time once the sponges grow and start
getting larger that you can then cut fragments off of these and use them in restoration projects.
We tried to get all of our fragments cut to approximately ten centimeters in size. We
harvested these fragments yesterday and some of them are starting to show a slightly blackish
color. We're not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. We're going to be watching
these sponges carefully on a daily basis in the beginning and then probably every week
or so to see how they survive and grow. When they started to turn black we started
to get very concerned, not knowing if we had done something wrong, or not knowing if we
had potentially killed all these sponge fragments that we had harvested. However, we were very relieved
to see that even the next day the blackness goes away, the sponges are doing great, and
they appear to be re-attaching very quickly to both the rubble pieces that they've been
attached to and also to the grow out structures. For forty days Martin Moe has been monitoring
the survival and growth of the diadema larvae. A week ago, he hit a setback - all three cultures
were struck by an infestation of Vorticella, an organism that causes competition for food
and a decline in the larval development. But, one of the cultures showed a larger number
of well-formed larvae than the other two. He made a decision to dedicate the remaining
food supply to the survival of the well-formed culture and abandon the others. It might be
the only chance for at least some of the larvae to reach the settlement phase.
Now this one is ready to come out, and we can check for settlers on it. And they settle
as larvae and then they go through metamorphosis in which the spines and larval tissue
all drop down into the rudiment and the rudiment becomes a little round juvenile. And you can
pull it out of the settlement, like this, and the water stays in these little cubicles,
then you put it right down into the settlement tray. The water in the settlement tray is
all adjusted for temperature, pH, alkalinity, calcium, and its ready to support the process
of metamorphosis and the early juvenile. After they go through metamorphosis they're
a soft little creature. And they can't survive as a soft little creature. They have to pull
calcium carbonate, the same stuff your bones are made out of, out of the water, which is
dissolved in the water, and they have to form their hard parts and their mouth parts so
they can actually scrape and feed and survive as a sea urchin rather than a pelagic
floating larvae. And then it can be carried and placed down into this raceway kind of
facility. I call it a raceway, there's a water current that moves all through the whole tank
like this, and as they are settling there it keeps the water fresh and clear around
them. They grow and become little urchins on these plates. At some point it becomes
optimum to be able to pick the plate up and put it in a bucket, and then they'll stay stuck on the plate,
then you can move them to any kind of a grow out area that you wish.
After four years of developing the technology to raise lab cultured diadema, Martin Moe
is nearing the end of his quest.
When we get to the point where we can produce large numbers of juvenile diadema then we
can begin to research on what is the best way to re-establish them on the reef. At that
point, along with Kens work with the corals and what I've been able to develop with the
diadema, we can come together and we can achieve at least some semblance of ecological restoration
on the reefs. At the grounding site the sponge transplants
are healthy and growing. Amanda Bourque is watchful as the sponges replicate their natural
behavior in a transformed environment. But, it will take several years of monitoring before
the success of this project is fully known. Coral reef restoration is an emerging science
built on innovative ideas, lessons learned and continual refinement of the human technologies
that are helping nature restore its gardens of the sea.
Major funding for this program was provided by The Batchelor Foundation, encouraging people
to preserve and protect America's underwater resources.