We are excited to share the world’s longest running underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 569 days through November 20th, 2024. This period covers summer 2023’s unprecedented coral bleaching event, and indeed multiple corals can be seen bleaching, but then recovering and growing through 2024.
Of greatest interest to us is the success and proliferation of the urban strain of staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis aka ACER ‘ventura’) that not only did not bleach, but has grown swiftly. We look forward to continuing our scientific investigation into the mechanisms of their resilience, and hope to amplify this strain for the purpose of restoring Miami’s nearshore reefs.
Our ability to timelapse the growth of PortMiami’s urban corals highlights the scientific value of the Coral City Camera and its ability to document what was previously undocumented. After 5 years of near-continuous recording, and more than 210 species of fish cataloged, there is no underwater coral reef site anywhere in the world that has been as thoroughly recorded and archived.
A new scientific paper has been published in the research journal Frontiers in Remote Sensing titled ‘Automatic detection of unidentified fish sounds: a comparison of traditional deep learning with machine learning’ authored by Xavier Mouy et al, which analyzed week-long hydrophone recordings of the Coral City Camera site at PortMiami in order to detect fish sounds.
The researchers found that using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) enabled detection of fish sounds that both human analysts and traditional spectrogram data analysis otherwise could not detect. The CNN was trained using hydrophone recordings made in British Columbia, but proved accurate in the novel environment at PortMiami, even despite significant background noises from boats. The software developed for this study is open-source and available to other researchers.
Stay tuned in the coming months as we prepare to connect a hydrophone to the Coral City Camera and provide an audio channel to the YouTube livestream. If possible, we aim to incorporate real-time analysis of the underwater sounds to help monitor and track fish activity.
The summer of 2023 will go down as the hottest in recorded history (thus far). Sadly, hot ocean water means coral bleaching, and Florida’s corals suffered tremendously this year. Fortunately the Coral City Camera was in position to create the world’s most comprehensive in-situ coral bleaching timelapses ever documented by human technology. Many attempts have been made to record a coral bleaching event, but to our knowledge, this is the most complete and longest running coral time lapse made underwater in a coral reef environment. The time lapse begins on May 1st, 2023 and you can see that the staghorn corals start growing and branching quickly. However, by mid-July water temperatures have reached the critical bleaching threshold of 87 degrees Fahrenheit (30.5C) and quickly turn white. The transplanted staghorns and elkhorn corals not only bleached, but they subsequently died. You can see how after turning white, they turn gray-brown as they are colonized by turf algae in August and September, and then they erode almost as quickly as they grew, expedited by the abundant parrotfish that graze this algae from the corals’ limestone skeletons.
Bleaching occurs when the metabolism of the golden-brown symbiotic algae that live in the coral tissue known as zooxanthellae goes into thermal overdrive. The algae’s production of photosynthetically-produced oxygen exceeds the limit the coral can safely handle inside its tissues, resulting in expulsion of the zooxanthellae (and its brown color) from its host. Because zooxanthellae normally provide a coral with photosynthetically-produced sugars, it begins to starve without these symbionts. Fast-growing corals like the endangered staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and elkhorn (Acropora palmata) lack the energy stores that fleshier corals like brain corals have, and die from bleaching stress much more easily.
By the end of August 2023, all of the staghorn and elkhorn corals experimentally-transplanted by the University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef program succumbed to the excess heat and bleaching. These were corals that are native to cooler, cleaner waters offshore Miami, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise that they could not survive the urban reef environment around the CCC. However, a single strain of staghorn and elkhorn coral that are native to the Port did not bleach and continued growing happily despite water temps exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit (+32C). Not taking any chances, we brought fragments of these urban strains of stag and elkhorn coral into climate-controlled conditions at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic Marine Lab in July. Once water temperatures cooled enough, these fragments were safely returned to the CURES (Coral Urban Research Experimental Site) nursery frame that sits about 20’ from the CCC.
Many corals like the mustard hill coral (Porites asteroides) did not fully recover from bleaching until December 2023. Most of the brain corals had recovered from bleaching by November 2023.
Amazingly, a significant number of corals native to PortMiami did not bleach, suggesting that they have a combination of genes and microbiomes that have enabled them to adapt to the Anthropogenic conditions along Miami’s urban coastline. The native urban corals that did bleach managed to survive for several months without any zooxanthellae to provide them with energy, before recovering new zooxanthellae in autumn when cooler water returned. It is possible that the higher levels of nutrients and plankton in the water helped provide these corals with additional energy captured as food.
These urban corals and the bleaching timelapses highlight the scientific value of the Coral City Camera and its ability to document what was previously undocumented. After 4 years of near-continuous recording, and more than 205 species of fish cataloged, there is no underwater coral reef site anywhere in the world that has been as thoroughly recorded and archived.
While corals throughout Florida and the Keys suffered tremendously in the summer of 2023, the stressful event also demonstrated that not all corals shared the same fates. Even within the same species, some corals did not bleach, bleached and recovered, or bleached and died. Studying the resilient strains of urban corals at PortMiami may illuminate how they’ve been able to adapt to marginal conditions and excessive heat. With global fossil fuel emissions continuing to rise unsustainably, we can expect even hotter summers in the years to come. Will corals be able to adapt naturally fast enough? Will scientists be able to accelerate the evolution of these corals to withstand hotter water temperatures? We are in an existential race against time, but we believe (now more than ever) that Miami’s urban corals will play an important role in finding out what makes a resilient coral ‘super’. The newly launched Coral City Foundation aims to build a land-based coral lab in 2024 to unlock these secrets and amplify their numbers.
In a new paper published in the research journal Scientific Reports, ‘Coral persistence despite marginal conditions in the Port of Miami‘, the monitoring of sites throughout the Port since 2018 revealed periodic extremes in temperature, seawater pH, and salinity, far in excess of what have been measured in most coral reef environments. Despite conditions that would kill many reef species, we have documented diverse coral communities growing on artificial substrates at these sites—reflecting remarkable tolerance to environmental stressors. Furthermore, many of the more prevalent species within these communities are now conspicuously absent or in low abundance on nearby reefs, owing to their susceptibility and exposure to stony coral tissue loss disease.
As we hypothesized in 2014 and evidenced by our recent findings, Miami’s system of urban waterways provides an inadvertent anthropogenic laboratory whose corals hold keys to understanding how the world’s coral reefs might adapt to changing climate and water chemistry in the decades to come.
Rescue a Reef explains what they hope to achieve in this exciting new chapter in Coral City:
‘One year ago, the Rescue a Reef team from the University of Miami outplanted colonies of staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) at the Coral City Camera to create a public-facing restoration site and better understand how corals adapt to urban environments. We were thrilled with their success! To expand on this small-scale experiment, we outplanted twenty-five colonies of elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) at the CCC and will monitor their growth, productivity, and resilience over the next year! The new corals consisted of five different genotypes that were put through heat stress testing by UM and the Shedd Aquarium, and included some of the most successful in the face of rising temperatures. This experiment was designed to be a springboard for expanded research and explore novel ways to garden and restore corals in urban environments. Along with a greater understanding of our Coral City, we hope that having a public-facing coral restoration site will help communities make a stronger connection with corals and give them more incentives to fight to protect them!’
As reported in the Miami New Times, in June 2022, a combination of heavy rains and an ancient crumbling seawall in the process of reinforcement along Star Island’s southwest corner resulted in its collapse. The collapse was discovered by our colleagues at NOAA who arrived there by boat to study the nature and resilience of the urban corals in North Biscayne Bay. This is in addition to sites on the north and south side of the MacArthur Causeway and the east end of PortMiami near the Coral City Camera. Brain corals from these sites were analyzed and published ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Coral Persistence Within Highly Urbanized Locations in PortMiami’ in 2021, the first paper of its kind to offer an explanation for the success of these corals compared to their offshore counterparts.
Coral Morphologic first began exploring these urban habitats after documenting an unusual Acropora sp. inside Government Cut in 2009 which totally upended the idea of what an ‘ideal’ habitat was for these endangered stony corals. We subsequently started exploring areas deeper in North Biscayne Bay and found surprisingly robust populations of reef building corals. When a historic cold snap in January 2010 left them unphased (while the Florida Keys nearshore corals were all but wiped out), we began to suspect that the corals in these habitats were truly special, and scientifically valuable for research.
Colin first observed the Star Island seawall on Feb 14th 2013 when Gloria Estefan’s son Nayib asked him to document the marine life living along their riprap seawall (she was so happy to learn how healthy it was!). He was amazed by the life on these rocks, and how many more fish there were around them then on the neighboring seawall that lacked riprap. But upon closer inspection there were several very large Orbicella faveolata encrusted directly on it and multiple large brain corals at the base of it. This seawall at 40 Star Island Drive was likely the oldest seawall in Miami, possibly dating back to its development in the 1920s.
When the SCTLD (Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease) outbreak took off in 2015 we observed that these urban corals seemed to be more resistant to it, and would often survive with partial mortality. With these anecdotal observations, Dr. Ian Enochs of NOAA reached out to us about setting up a formal investigation to see how these corals might differ from their offshore counterparts.
In early 2020 with the launch of the Coral City Camera, the CURES (Coral Urban Research Experimental Site) nursery was set up within view at the east end of Port Miami where research continues to this day (and now serves as an experimental research site for Rescue a Reef to ‘stress adapt’ their corals to help find more resilient strains that will be useful in the restoration of Miami’s nearshore reefs).
After NOAA and the University of Miami performed the rescue of the corals at 40 Star Island in July, they repatriated a number of them to an offshore ‘Spawning Hub’ on Rainbow Reef where they will be able to spawn with other members of their species and hopefully provide some other their resilient genetics and microbiome to the next generation. Fifteen colonies and fragments of corals were also brought to the Coral City Camera site at PortMiami where they were cemented down by UM scientists. Several weeks later, all these transplanted corals have survived and appear to be settling in nicely to their new urban coral community.
Update 11/2/22: Watch a follow-up feature on the seawall collapse and coral rescue with ABC WPLG Local 10 anchor / reporter Louis Aguirre:
On June 23rd, 2021 fifteen colonies of five different genotypes of endangered staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) were transplanted to the rubble zone in front of the Coral City Camera by Rescue a Reef, a citizen science program based at the University of Miami. The goal of this experiment was to try and identify stress-tolerant strains of staghorn corals to better inform Rescue a Reef of the strains best suited for near-shore habitats. We anticipated that not all the strains would survive (or perhaps none would survive), but given that this was a science experiment using clones, any mortality would be offset by the fact that dozens to hundreds of more clones exist in Rescue a Reefs offshore coral nurseries. The results greatly exceeded our best expectations!
As far as we are aware, this is the longest continuous in-situ growth timelapse of corals ever made!
This timelapse begins on June 28, 2021, just a few days after transplantation and replacing the CCC (which slightly altered the perspective). Over the course of the next several weeks, tissue die-off progressed rapidly across many of the colonies (Seen as bright white skeleton before being overgrown with brown algae). However, after a month of acclimation, the staghorn corals stabilized and adapted to their new Anthropogenic habitat despite water temperatures exceeding 90 (32C) in August and September (but no significant coral bleaching was observed!). Over the course of this time, the perspective shifts slowly as the Camera slowly subsides in the sediment and leans away from the rubble zone (due to the powerful currents in the area).
Ongoing research with University of Miami, NOAA, and Penn State University is now looking into the microbiomes of these staghorn corals to compare how they may have changed from their offshore clones. We observed on a night dive in September of 2021 while filming the ‘Coral City Fluorotour‘ that these staghorn corals were expressing fluorescent green proteins which is unusual for the species, and isn’t observed in their offshore counterparts. Unlocking the secrets of these urban-adapted ‘super corals’ is just the next step in understanding their remarkable resilience. Perhaps the site around PortMiami is ideal for evolutionarily assisting and stress-adapting corals before out-planting to the beleaguered nearshore reefs around Miami.
Just as the new coral growth is interesting to watch, equally interesting is to witness the erosion and disappearance of the dead staghorn branches of the colony closest to the Camera. This erosion occurs from the parrotfish whose powerful beak-like teeth can rasp the surface layer of algae while crunching the limestone skeleton (and then pooping sand). The club-tipped finger coral (Porites porites) in the lower right corner of the view is also interesting to observe over the year, as the parrotfish are fond of eating the healthy branch tips, rendering them very club-like in Coral City!
Playback speed is at 15 frames (days) per second (about one month per 2 seconds).
President of the UN Geneva General Assembly, Abdulla Shahid and Colin touring the Center for Marine Innovation upon its completion.
Coral Morphologic was recently commissioned by Fundación Grupo Puntacana (FGPC) at the Punta Cana Resort & Club to overhaul and upgrade their coral restoration lab infrastructure at their Center for Marine Innovation with funding support from the German GIZ. This project entailed re-plumbing an outdoor greenhouse that is capable of running either closed-loop, or pulling water directly from the ocean for easy flushing and water changes. Additionally, a climate-controlled indoor lab was also constructed utilizing the latest technology for coral aquaculture, including Ecotech G5 XR30 LED lights, Apex Neptune aquarium computers, Reef Octopus protein skimmers, and calcium reactors. This improved lab infrastructure is enabling marine scientists at FGPC to generate thousands of microfrags of massive reef-building species such as brain and star corals. These important corals will add needed biodiversity to their long-running reef restoration program that has successfully out-planted thousands of staghorn corals grown on their underwater nursery tables offshore.
The climate-controlled indoor coral microfragmentation systems and wet lab feature state-of-the-art LED and aquarium technology to keep freshly fragmented corals healthy.
Coral microfragmentation: growing corals smarter and faster.
Outdoor microfragmentation systems are utilized for long-term grow-out before the corals are transplanted back onto Puntacana’s reefs.
The indoor coral microfragmentation systems and wet lab were designed with a viewing window that enables tourists to observe marine scientists microfragging and growing corals, without interrupting their work.
We are excited to present Illuminating Coral, an eight-episode educational course created with our longtime collaborator John McSwain during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The course, made exclusively with Parley for the Oceans, dives into the lives’ of coral, sheds light on their vital role in our global ecosystem, and offers solutions on how humans and coral can live in symbiosis both now and in the future. Watch Illuminating Coral in full via the Parley Ocean School @ https://edu.parley.tv/course/illuminating-coral/
Undescribed fluorescent Palythoa species photographed along the shoreline of PortMiami.
We are happy to announce the publication of a scientific paper in Springer Nature analyzing the presence and potency of palytoxin (PLTX) in Palythoa spp. and Zoanthus spp. Zoantharians conducted by the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography and Coral Biome in Marseilles, France. PLTX is one of the most potent toxins known on the planet. It is an extremely large and complex organic compound that has been described by biochemists as the ‘Mt. Everest of organic synthesis’. An organism that naturally produces large amounts of PLTX is of great importance for research scientists to better understand its pharmacology. PLTX has been found to have toxic effects on head and neck tumors, and therefore warrants further pharmaceutical investigation.
Initially, this compound was blue-prospected in Hawaii where native Hawaiian people used the the mucous of Palythoa found in a very specific (and taboo) tide pool (known as limu-make-o-Hana, the ‘seaweed of death of Hana’) to coat their spear points before battle. So taboo was this tide pool for outsiders, that when scientists sampled the Palythoa in 1961, they found their lab burned to the ground on the same day. A reminder to scientists to respect native wisdom, culture, and practices when performing science on other cultures’ land!
In this paper we found that an undescribed species (Palythoa aff. clavata) we sampled from PortMiami in 2012 was found to have five times the concentration of the notorious Hawaiian species Palythoa toxica. The experiment also tried to determine whether PLTX was produced by symbiotic microbial symbionts / zooxanthellae, or by the organism itself. Highest concentrations of PLTX were found within the tissue itself, and isolated cultures of zooxanthellae from these polyps failed to produce PLTX in the laboratory. This suggests, but does not confirm, that the Palythoa polyps themselves are producing this toxin. While the mechanism of its biosynthesis remains unknown, it highlights how Miami’s urban marine environs hold important scientific discoveries still waiting to be uncovered.
We are proud to present Coral City Flourotour, our first short film in 3 years, and our first in-ocean filming project using techniques developed in the CM lab / studio. Coral City Flourotour documents the highly fluorescent corals living near the Coral City Camera site at PortMiami.
These urban corals are not just survivors, but pioneers who have self-recruited to the boulder shoreline deployed to the Port in 2010. Some of the larger brain corals featured were previously transplanted from other urban habitats by Miami-Dade County DERM. Coral Morphologic has documented 27 of Florida’s 48 stony coral species living at this site, as well as more than 170 species of fish documented via the CCC.
Critically endangered staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) were transplanted to the site in June 2021 by University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef program. The fluorescence survey conducted in this film revealed they’ve activated fluorescent proteins which are not normally expressed in offshore waters. Scientists from UM and NOAA are now seeking to understand what changes these corals have undergone adapting to life in such an anthropogenically-altered environment, as it may have larger implications related to the restoration of Floridian and Caribbean reefs. Recently published research by NOAA has discovered the corals living in these urbanized environments have made important adaptations that enable them to thrive in Miami’s coastal waters.
Special Thanks to Bridge Initiative, Bas Fisher Invitational, PortMiami, Biscayne Bay Pilots, Miami-Dade County, NOAA AOML, Rescue a Reef
Symmetrical Brain Coral (Pseuododiploria strigosa) emersed during low tide along the shoreline of PortMiami.
For more than a decade, Coral Morphologic has sought to shine a spotlight on Miami’s intertidal urban corals and their potential scientific value. These surprisingly resilient corals appear to avoid bleaching and stem disease better than their conspecifics offshore on the natural reefs. Over the past two years we have been working with scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) to explain these differences using molecular lab analysis of tissue samples collected in the field. That work finally culminated in ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Coral Persistence Within Highly Urbanized Locations in the Port of Miami, Florida‘ published in the research journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
We found that the Symmetrical Brain Corals (Pseuododiploria strigosa) living in the urban environment (specifically alongside MacArthur Causeway and Star Island in Miami) were predominantly colonized by the Durusdinium sp. strain of symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) that provides the coral with photosynthetic energy during daylight hours. Durusdinium is known to be a heat-tolerant genus of zooxanthellae, and has long been investigated by scientists seeking to create bleaching-resistant ‘super corals’. However, until this study, the Symmetrical Brain Coral had rarely been observed hosting this species of zooxanthellae elsewhere in the region, making these observations here in Miami quite remarkable.
Beyond the helpful symbionts, the Symmetrical Brain Corals living in the urban environment were also found to be producing proteins and enzymes known to identify and digest pathogenic invaders. These proteins could be a two-fold benefit to the coral since disease-causing microbes can be digested as food before they can infect the coral. The urban marine environments around Miami often have high concentrations of phytoplankton and turbidity in the water, along with high bacterial concentrations that frequently require ‘no swim’ public health advisories. The ability to capture and extract more energy from food could enhance its health and provide sustenance during times of bleaching.
These findings from a single species of urban coral in Miami’s coastal environment suggest further investigation is warranted in the variety of other reef-building species that have self-recruited to the City’s concrete and riprap shorelines. It also demonstrates how the human-made hydrogeologic conditions around PortMiami serve as an evolutionary gauntlet selecting for corals better adapted for life in the Anthropocene.
We kicked off the launch with a party at Pérez Art Museum on the Miami waterfront. Romulo Del Castillo provided the Miami jams following a panel discussion led by National Geographic explorer Alizé Carrère featuring Colin, NOAA scientist Dr. Ian Enochs, and Miami Beach’s environment & sustainability director Elizabeth Wheaton.
Update6/1/20: The CCC is now screening at the Miami International Airport as part of the Miami International Airport Moving Images (MIAmi) video installation series, located near gate J7:
Update 10/16/20: The CCC is now screening at the HistoryMiami Museum.
For Design Miami 2019/, we debuted a preview of the Coral City Camera, a 360° live stream underwater camera located at our collaborative research site with NOAA’s AOML Coral Program. The CCC aims to supplement our urban coral research with real-time scientific data and offer a source of natural wonderment to the public, with the live stream officially going live in February 2020.
Over the past several years we’ve been working toward the installation of an underwater camera in Biscayne Bay as a component of our research into Miami’s coral ecosystems. Recently, with the support of Bas Fisher Invitational & Bridge Initiative under National Endowment for the Arts & Knight Foundation grants, we installed a 360° live stream underwater camera at our collaborative research site with NOAA’s AOML Coral Program. In addition to providing valuable scientific data, the live stream will be available free to the public as an educational tool and source of wonderment. The Coral City Camera live stream will be officially available to watch in February, with a preview at Design Miami/ December 3-8. Check out the video above to see how the camera was installed with View Into the Blue.
Coral Morphologic was recently commissioned to build a high-tech indoor coral microfragmentation and wet lab by the Alligator Head Foundation in Portland, Jamaica. Additionally, a 300 gallon reef biotope was built to serve as an educational display. Over the course of three trips, the Coral Morphologic team coordinated purchasing, exporting, and constructing the AHF Marine Lab where it now serves both the local marine scientists working to protect the Alligator Head Marine Sanctuary, as well as international scientists that can visit and conduct their work with state-of-the-art equipment in a controlled laboratory setting.
On November 27th we embarked on the first field trip with researchers from NOAA and University of Miami for the next phase of Coral Morphologic’s long-term project to document, study, and conserve Miami’s unusually resilient ‘urban corals’. That is, the corals that have pioneered into Miami’s intercoastal waterways as larvae and settled onto man-made infrastructure. It is precisely Miami’s legacy of anthropogenic disturbance that led Coral Morphologic to recognize that the City was a real-world window in which to understand how corals may adapt and evolve to anthropogenic impacts.
Studying genetic variation and the underlying causes of these variations is at the heart of a global effort to identify more resilient coral genotypes capable of restoring degraded coral habitat. Most of this research has focused on traditionally healthy, offshore reef habitats and identifying corals that show more resilience to stress than neighbors, or in experimental lab settings with distinct coral colonies of the same species subjected to stressful conditions. However, our project proposes to sample the tissue of healthy coral colonies (specifically Pseudodiploria strigosa and Porites asteroides) living in less than ideal ‘urban’ conditions, as well as healthy coral living offshore in ‘natural’ conditions, to determine if the genetic variation between sites is significant. The sample sites will also be surveyed and scientifically described by community assessment and seasonal changes through photo mosaics, monitoring of water chemistry, temperature, pH, and light levels, to quantify and compare site conditions. The final phase of this project will involve transplanting corals to the tip of PortMiami from each of the ‘urban’ sites, along with fragments from the offshore, natural reef to compare how each is able to adapt, and eventually developing an ‘urban coral’ nursery to grow the most resilient coral genotypes for restoration of reefs and laboratory research.
But the first task in this year-long study was to characterize each of the study sites through photo-mosaics that create three dimensional maps using a pair of GoPro cameras. These maps will serve as our detailed baseline imagery to better understand the forces of coral recruitment, growth, mortality, competition from macroalgae, and the accumulation of trash/ debris over time. Watch the video above to see each of the three urban coral research sites and the techniques used to document them. We look forward to providing updates over the course of the year as we document the sites, analyze transcriptomes, transplant corals, and characterize range of water quality and chemical conditions that Miami’s urban corals endure.
Read Part 2 (& Part 1) of our essay on super corals: ‘On Super Corals and Where to Find Them (A Closer Look at Miami’s Urban Coral Ecosystem)’ on Medium or click the link below:
Read Part 1 of our essay on super corals: ‘On Super Corals and Where to Find Them (Or a Cautionary Tale of Using Memes in Science)’ on Medium or click the link below:
One of the last tasks we took on before securing our laboratory prior to Hurricane Irma was check on the health of a community of endangered staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) just offshore Miami Beach. This community is one of the few remaining nearshore populations of these corals in Florida, and has proven to be more resilient than populations further south in Biscayne National Park, which have suffered from diseases in recent years. Because these staghorn corals along Miami Beach are growing on flat, hard seafloor, we knew that they were going to be subjected to significant wave energy during Hurricane Irma.
When we finally had a chance to survey the damage this past week, we sadly found that most of the staghorn colonies had been smashed to bits. Fortunately, many of the broken pieces of coral survived the maelstrom and have already begun cementing themselves back down to the sea floor and developing healthy new growth tips. While hurricanes can be exceptionally damaging to coral reefs, asexual fragmentation of corals due to these storms is also an important way they can colonize large areas of substrate. As unfortunate as it is to see this damage, based on what we observed post-hurricane offshore Miami Beach, we can expect new colonies to form, and thickets of these endangered corals will return once again.
Members of the Gables Earth Club with the 300 gallon Coral Morphologic reef aquarium post-installation in 2015.
In September 2015 the lease ended on our first lab warehouse and we had to downsize our systems. We decided to donate our 300 gallon glass reef aquarium system–complete with all the gear, rocks, and corals–to the students of Coral Gables Senior High School in order to plant the seeds of reefkeeping and coral aquaculture in the next generation. The lab is maintained by student members of the Gables Earth Club, and overseen by faculty science teacher Mr. Eric Molina. We believe that no other activity accomplishes the goals of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) better than reef keeping, and includes an added R for Responsibility (STREAM). While math and science can be taught from textbooks, the holistic act of coral aquaculture requires hands-on attention and care. We’ve observed firsthand how these students understood the assignment and really have gone above and beyond to care for these delicate creatures.
Coral Morphologic is proud to announce a partnership with Mission Blue, an alliance of conservationists founded by Dr. Sylvia Earle, with the shared goal of exploring the ocean and engendering empathy for Earth’s marine life. By joining the Mission Blue network, we look forward to helping advance Mission Blue’s goals, including increasing marine protected areas (Hope Spots) around the globe 20% by 2020, developing sustainable fisheries, and reducing oceanic pollution. Coral Morphologic is committed to educating the public and building new paradigms around the value of the ocean and its essential role as Earth’s life support system.
Please explore Mission Blue’s website and watch the eponymous 2015 documentary about Dr. Earle “Mission Blue” on Netflix.
These Palythoa sp. zoantharians contain a remarkably potent chemical, palytoxin, proven to selectively destroy cancerous cells.
Several years ago we were excited to report that our survey of Zoantharian soft corals from South Florida had resulted in the identification of several undescribed species. Today, we are even more excited to report that one of these Palythoa species zoantharians, collected off the PortMiami seawall, contains an extremely powerful compound with proven anti-cancer properties. Coral Biome, our partners in Europe, have officially received a patent for the chemical’s extraction and application in the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases. From Coral Biome’s inception in 2011 in Marseilles, France, we have been assisting them in the collection, identification, and aquaculture of soft corals that produce medically-valuable chemicals, a process known as ‘bioprospecting’.
The Deep Dredge of Government Cut has caused significant coral stress and mortality on the corals and reefs in and around Miami… including wide areas that the Army Corps predicted would not be affected. In particular, the dredging at PortMiami has resulted in vast sediment plumes that arc around the south-side of Fisher Island and out through Norris Cut where federally protected elkhorn corals are suffering.
As mitigation against this coral die-off and stress, Coral Morphologic proposes the construction of an ‘urban coral research nursery’ along the edge of South Pointe Park where the public can be directly engaged with the marine ecosystem of Miami. This coral nursery will be built primarily to house and grow fragments from the variety of Acropora corals living around Fisher Island. The coral nursery will be a proactive mitigation response to a shameful coral transplantation effort on Fisher Island and the siltation-related mortality of coral around Miami.
In order to test the resilience of these Fisher Island Acropora corals, it is imperative that these colonies are grown and cloned into as many individual colonies as possible. Not only will this allow for exhaustive in-situ research projects, but it will also result in additional fragments useful for restoring reefs around Miami after the Deep Dredge is completed. Because the Fisher Island Acropora corals are so unique, the only way to properly test their resilience is to fragment them repeatedly over time to create enough cloned test subjects. Because the hybrid Acropora corals are not conferred federal protection, their clones are ideally suited for life in educational public aquarium reef displays around the globe where they will become fluorescent icons of adaptation and resilience for both Miami and coral-kind.
Coral Morphologic proposes that such a coral nursery should be deployed just inside Government Cut along South Pointe Park which provides ideal water conditions for growing all of the Miami’s ‘urban coral’ species; especially the Fisher Island Acropora corals. The South Pointe coral nursery will provide coral biologists with a low-cost, easily-accessible platform in which to pursue unique coral research projects that only Miami affords. Close access to land-based electrical and internet infrastructure will allow an array of tools that offshore nurseries can’t count on such as 24/7 live streaming underwater web cameras, flow meters, and water chemistry monitoring probes. A continuous stream of open-access data on the water quality moving into and out of Biscayne Bay with every tide will be necessary to provide the City with the most accurate information possible in which to predict future sea level rise and pollution. Furthermore, the addition of interactive signage will engage and educate citizens and tourists about the overlooked marine ecology of Miami Beach.
This coral nursery project will cost in the tens of thousands of dollars and require a long list of permits and permissions from agencies at the city, county, state, and federal level. While the levels of bureaucratic protection for corals are meant to be helpful, it also presents considerable roadblocks for those wishing to cultivate them for restoration and research. While an initial $10,000 Accelerator Grant from the Miami Foundation has kickstarted the planning process in earnest, we will be requiring more grant funding and donations to complete the project. We look forward to updating everyone on this project as we move forward to grow the rare and resilient ‘urban corals’ of Miami and Fisher Island!
Fisher Island Hybrid Fused Staghorn Coral (elkhorn morphotype) pre-dredge/ mid-dredge health survey.
The most remarkable aspect of the health of the corals growing on Fisher Island, is the success story of two hybrid fused-staghorn corals (Acropora prolifera) that live along its shorelines. The story of the first hybrid coral is well documented through the TEDxMIA talk Colin conducted in 2011. This hybrid coral appears to be much more palmate in its growth morphology which typically means that its mother was a staghorn and its father an elkhorn. This coral has proven to be the most remarkably resilient of the Fisher Island Acropora corals. While its growth has been somewhat slow, it has never demonstrated any evidence of significant die-off, white pox, or bleaching. It also features significant amounts of fluorescent green proteins which may confer it with an adaptive advantage over its non-fluorescent parent species.
However, there is another equally unusual hybrid fused-staghorn coral living on Fisher Island that we’ve also been observing since 2009. And it demonstrates a much more compact branching staghorn morphology, indicating that its mother was likely an elkhorn coral and its father a staghorn.
Aerial view of Biscayne Bay and Government Cut. Fisher Island is encircled in the Army Corps’ Deep Dredge silt 4/14/15.
Over the past eighteen months, the Army Corps of Engineers’ Deep Dredge of PortMiami has continuously released dirty water throughout Biscayne Bay and onto our surrounding reefs. The dredging will continue through at least August 2015. Over the course of the Dredge project we have observed levels of suspended silt far beyond what is environmentally acceptable or healthy in a coral reef environment. Silt that is directly causing coral mortality in areas far beyond where the Army Corps predicted.
One of Coral Morphologic’s biggest ongoing concerns during the Deep Dredge has been the well-being of a hybrid fused-staghorn coral (Acropora prolifera) colonizing the Fisher Island side of Government Cut. This coral is what kickstarted our interest in documenting the extent of coral colonization within Miami’s coastal waterways, and was the subject of Colin’s 2011 TEDxMIA talk ‘A Hybrid Future – The Corals of Miami‘. The concerns we expressed to the State of Florida about this coral is ultimately what led them to provide us with permits to rescue corals from the dredging far offshore… but not for the hybrid itself (or any other corals on Fisher Island).
We’re psyched to share a soundtrack of ours (‘Strand’) is part of Other Electricities‘ new “call and response” LP, where Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo’s Floridian field recordings are included in original and remixed forms. Stream Archival Feedbackvia Spotify and pick up the album in digital and vinyl / deluxe editions @ https://other-electricities.bandcamp.com/album/archival-feedback
Last month, our film Natural History Reduxscreened at the Imagine Science Film Festival held at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is located along the Arabian/ Persian Gulf as one of the coastal Emirates in the United Arab Emirates. Colin was asked to speak on a panel regarding the future of global water resources and the importance that art/ science has to play in bringing these issues into public awareness. However, he also had the opportunity to explore the unique marine habitat in the area.
A fluorescence photograph of the hybrid fused staghorn coral.
It was the discovery of a hybrid fused staghorn coral living on a granite boulder beneath the shadows of a luxury condo that initially sparked our interest in the resilient corals that are taking advantage of Miami’s underwater infrastructure. Colin first presented this coral to the public for TEDxMIA in 2011 in a talk titled ‘A Hybrid Future – The Corals of Miami’. But with the Army Corps’ Deep Dredge of Government Cut happening just a stones throw from where this coral lives, we have been particularly concerned about the health of this coral. Not only are Miami’s corals being inundated with excessive dredge silt, they’re also dealing with the same water conditions that have induced an alarming percentage of corals to bleach across South Florida’s reefs.
