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.
We are proud to unveil the limited edition Reef x Coral Morphologic Homeys, a Coral Morph-inspired cushioned slipper that celebrates the warmth and color of the coral reef during the winter months, when ocean time is limited.
Available in blue / neon green in men’s and tan / white in unisex, every sale benefits the Coral City Foundation’s efforts to upkeep the Coral City Camera and support ongoing CCF restoration projects. A perfect slipper to kick back and tune in to the CCC, the Coral Morph Homeys redefine the concept of the home shoe while making a meaningful impact. Read more about the collaboration here.
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.
We are proud to announce the forthcoming physical release of our album Coral Morphologic 2 via Miami’s best, Terrestrial Funk. To celebrate, have a listen to ‘Meridiem Suite’, a 3-song section from the album.
We are psyched to share the release of new music with our friend and citymate Nick León. Projections of a Coral City is available on vinyl LP and digipack CD via Balmat.
Colin, Nick, and J.D. in the Coral Morphologic lab. Photo by Karli Evans.
Written, produced, and performed by J.D. McKay and Nick León ~ Coral Morphologic is J.D. McKay and Colin Foord ~ Mixed by Angelo Fajardo ~ Mastered by Pedro Pina ~ Cover artwork by José Quintanar ~ Insert artwork by Robert Beatty ~ Insert note by Colin Foord and J.D. McKay ~ Designed by Basora ~ Full credits here.
We are thrilled to team with O, Miami Poetry Festival for a month-long program of aquatic poetry with Coral City Couplets. This month (April, National Poetry Month), students across Miami-Dade County will tune in to watch underwater live streams from the Coral City Camera, then write original poems inspired by our unique subtropical marine life. Special Thanks to Miami educators Monica Asencio and Katie Ortiz, creators of the Coral City Couplets curriculum. Read the month’s poems via our Instagram or YouTube accounts.
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.
On Sunday, May 21st, the live audiovisual experience that was Aqua Garden Flow gently pulsed in and out of the historic Miami Beach Bandshell like a jellyfish on the tide. Laraaji and Arji OceAnanda‘s shimmering, joyous score of the film we created with Robert Beatty navigated mangrove stands, seagrass beds, and labyrinths of coral caves to arrive at a journey’s end shared by hundreds—one that felt like the beginning of a new era for Coral Morphologic.
We wish heartfelt thanks to Laraaji, Arji, Robert, and the team at the Rhythm Foundation / Miami Beach Bandshell for an amazing creative collaboration, immersive production, and fit venue for us all to witness Aqua Garden Flow come to life.
Post-Aqua Garden Flow bliss.Laraaji, Colin Foord, Robert Beatty, J.D. McKay, and Arji OceAnanda.
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.
Watch thefull Projections of a Coral City program above.
The sun has set on Projections of a Coral City, our largest installation to date, and we are thankful for everyone who made this monumental work possible. From the Knight Foundation’s continued support of our mission, to the collaborative spirit of the Arsht Center, to the hundreds of thousands of people who witnessed this installation: we are eternally grateful.
Projections of a Coral City was the 15-year culmination of our goal to create a new mythology for the city of Miami — one that tells the story of past, present, and future sea-level rise and fall and the ouroboros of architectural development — of the ancient coral reef tract’s calcium carbonate structures and its re-use millennia later in concrete skyscrapers of present day. We hope that Projections of a Coral City shed light on the sea-level rise projections referenced in the project’s title, and how the City’s buildings and infrastructure might be reclaimed by coral as an artificial reef should humanity not act to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change, to which Miami is among the most vulnerable cities on Earth.
Special Thanks to the Knight Foundation, whose generous support made POACC possible; the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, who graciously hosted the event; the dream team of creatives that helped us bring POACC to life; and Light Harvest / A3 Visual for the absolutely stunning projection display.
We are ecstatic to announce Projections of a Coral City, a large-scale projection-mapping installation to be presented on the exterior of the Knight Concert Hall nightly, 6PM-12AM, during Miami Art Week from Tuesday, November 29 through Saturday, December 3, 2022. Projections of a Coral City, featuring macroscopic images of corals native to Miami and from around the world, is a monumental artwork and the largest projection of corals ever presented globally. Projections of a Coral City is made possible through the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Miami is a coral city. Built with marine limestone mined from the Everglades, its concrete skyline stands like corals colonizing the fossilized reef ridge on which the city was built. Miami and its maritime environment are inextricably connected geologically, historically, culturally and economically. Engaging residents and visitors with Miami’s coral reefs and waters connects them to the literal foundation of the city and to its future.
The corals featured in Projections of a Coral City were grown on flat tiles and 3D-printed scale models of the Knight Concert Hall over many years in our Miami laboratory, and subsequently photographed and enlarged to envelop the building’s southwest side. These aquacultured corals include the colorful, native Ricordea florida corallimorph. Corallimorphs are an understudied group of soft corals that scientists predict will proliferate in a world where oceans are acidified and stony corals can no longer calcify into reefs. Projections of a Coral City reimagines the Knight Concert Hall’s terraced form designed by architect César Pelli as an ever-morphing coral head and, as the sea-level rise projections referenced in the project’s title portend, suggests how the City’s buildings and infrastructure might be reclaimed by coral as an artificial reef should humanity not act to prevent and mitigate sea-level rise.
An ambient soundscape foreshadowing the City’s future by Coral Morphologic and Nick León will play in tandem with the projections on the Arsht Center’s Thomson Plaza for the Arts on Biscayne Boulevard.
Today, October 6th, marks 15 years of Coral Morphologic! Here’s us celebrating @ CM HQ with the lab cats. Thank You to everyone who has shown us love and support over the years: you know who you are and we love you too!
Threshold: a series of gently-swaying coral archways lead departing passengers from land to sea.
We are excited to unveil Threshold, a new Coral Morphologic video work and our second public art installation at PortMiami. Threshold was commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places in conjunction with Virgin Voyages for the recently-built Terminal V. Take a quick tour below:
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:
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.
We are thrilled to share we’ll be curating ‘An Evening with Coral Morphologic‘ at the historic Tower Theater Miami on April 30th. In addition to inaugurating Tower’s new lobby projection system with a CM audiovisual installation, we’ll be showing a film program in the theater consisting of Miami’s first official Tangerine Reef screening, John McSwain’s CM documentary Coral City, and a Q & A session with CM, McSwain, and Brian Weitz of Animal Collective moderated by Miami-based writer and photographer Monica Uszerowicz.
The event is free and open to the public but we kindly ask patrons to RSVP at this link. The audiovisual installation/ happy hour runs 5-7pm, and the film program/ Q & A runs 7-9pm. We will have a version of the poster above for sale at the event, designed by Rob Carmichael of SEEN Studio.
Update 5/1/19: Our audiovisual installation in the theater’s lobby will run till early December – if you are in the area feel free to stop in and check it out.
We’re psyched to share a soundtrack of ours (‘Oolite’) is included on the second Space Tapes compilation. The album features artists based in or from Florida. Stream Space Tapes, Vol. 2 via Spotify and pick up the album in digital and vinyl editions @ https://spacetapesmia.bandcamp.com/album/space-tapes-vol-2-st009
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:
On February 24th 2017, Coral Morphologic presents Coral Orgy, a collaborative site specific performance with Animal Collective at the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center on Miami Beach. Coral Orgy is an audiovisual meditation on the secrets behind the sexual reproduction of corals, and an invocation towards the human quest of unlocking them. Animal Collective will perform an hour of new music inspired by the reefs while Coral Morphologic projects a cosmic world of fluorescent coral inside the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center performance using its twelve 4k projectors to map all five of Gehry’s sails. Before the performance, Coral Morphologic films will play outside on the 7,000 square foot projection wall in SoundScape Park.
Through this event, Coral Morphologic and Animal Collective aim to highlight the groundbreaking scientific work done on coral reproduction by the non-profits Coral Restoration Foundation (USA), SECORE (GER), and Project Coral (UK).
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.
We are pleased to share the release of a series of apparel recycled from post-consumer plastic bottles, in collaboration with our friends at Waterlust. The ‘Cosmic Coral’ line features Coral Morphologic zoanthid, man o war, and flower anemone prints, and are now available to purchase from the Waterlust online shop. The leggings are 86% RPET (recycled polyester), 14% lycra, giving 10 post-consumer plastic bottles a positive future. Additionally, they are printed using dye-sublimation, an environmentally friendly process which uses no water and minimizes waste. 10% of profits go toward our efforts to research and document Miami’s imperiled coral reefs.
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!
