Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Inside the wild plan to reengineer coral reefs”.
Scientists in Florida are on an urgent mission to the Florida keys are in the grip of an unprecedented ocean Heat Wave, causing a crisis for coral reefs today we’re moving into phase two of the rescue mission. The Region’s coral reefs are in critical danger and conservationists are doing something as unprecedented as the heat they’re, taking corals out of the ocean to save them all those H crates with corals will come here and there. As I said, Okay, a nonprofit called the coral restoration Foundation is leading today’s charge. They operate a series of coral nurseries across the keys tree likee structures where they grow corals to plant in depleted reefs.
The corals here have been bleaching with alarming speed, they’re expelling the algae that gives them their color, a Telltale sign of stress. If the heat wave continues, all all the Corals in these nurseries could be wiped out. The solution, wild as it sounds, is a mass migration of corals.
Today, we’re focusing on quantity to get as many large colonies as possible from our nursery and bringing them to these landbased nurseries to then um Safeguard them. The Rescuers are focusing on stagghorn and Elkhorn corals. Two threatened species that are key to Restoration efforts and it becomes clear that the crew arrived in the nick of time see how pale these corals are top. So you’re already seeing some signs of bleaching, the rescued corals are transported back to land and then trucked to aquariums and Labs across Florida.
About 3,500 end up here at a field station called The Keys Marine Lab. These are quarantine tables until they get moving to the final tanks. The operation is a success. The prized corals are safe, but now what this Mass migration was? A desperate short-term move from here on out the playbook for saving corals gets Rewritten on the Fly. That’S after the break climate change is undeniably a real challenge for businesses around the globe and metaphor. Work is already creating tools enabling businesses to meet these challenges. Headon metaphor Works virtual mixed reality. Solutions allow people to collaborate from anywhere in the world as if they’re, in the same room together working on new products directly in a virtual space or allowing teams to work shoulder-to-shoulder in a virtual office.
It’S all saving on company travel, shipping and flights. Now meta doesn’t influence our editorial videos, but they do help us make important videos like this possible all right back to the team. Coral reefs, climate change and people are all tied tightly together as weather events, get more extreme reefs are key to protecting communities from flooding and Coastal erosion, but that same extreme weather is cooking corals and adding to a raft of threats.
Already de ating reefs around the world like disease pollution and over fishing, without quick action on climate change, research points to a more than 90 % loss of all coral reefs globally. The alarming water temperatures off Florida tonight and the heat wave in Florida got the world’s attention for its speed and intensity. Whatever happens next, the world will be watching that too.
It’S been a couple of months since that race to take Coral out of the sea Summer’s over and we’re in the Florida Keys to see what happened to them. We are looking at the elorn coral acrop, palmata, okay, these one that you can see here. Fenor Montoya Maya is a marine biologist with the coral restoration Foundation or CRF he’s caring for the rescued corals and Reckoning with a scale of damage from the summer. Crf lost half of all the Corals in its nurseries, entire restoration sites were wiped out, but F and the team still need to plan for the future. So they’re looking carefully at which corals fared best, whether here on land or in the ocean, it could help inform form the next phase of the rescue. Remember that we’re working with individuals at the end of the day right it belong to species, but within the species there are different genotypes that we behave individually right. So some cors will do really well under conditions and we’. Seen that that some survive some died really quickly, one thing is obvious: these corals need to get back to the wild ASAP.
The ocean is starting to cool down, and these tanks are actually a little too cozy. You cannot Babys seit. You know these corals because out there that’s the wild west for the corals right. We rather have them grow on those stressful conditions so that they can adapt to them and be resilient.
Okay for the next event, while CRF maintains its land-based sanctuaries, the federal government also set up a temporary Nursery in deeper cooler Waters. Good conservation means lots of hedging yeah. We have the backup of the backup of the backup hanging over all. This is a realization that this Mass migration could be needed again next summer and again and again I never thought about it.
I never imagined I never imagined it was possible um, but in honestly, in the last 8 to 10 years, it’s become more and more of we have to be prepared for this Cindy Lewis is the director of Keys Marine Lab, she’s, already stockpiling equipment for next summer. We’Re already prepared, we have a lot of equipment on site kind of like a NASCAR crew. We can run in and and replace a a three horse pump quicker than you can blink, and I keep telling them what what can I do for you guys. They say just keep the corals alive.
Just keep the corals alive, despite its losses. This summer, CRF is forging ahead, growing corals at scale and replanting them in the wild and they’ve gotten more sophisticated about tracking their efforts. So we load up all of the images we set some settings and then what is produced first is a three-dimensional model of the area. This is a photo Mosaic of a nearby Reef for CRF is working. It’S stitched, together from GoPro footage that the team takes at the restoration sites with this view of the reef, it’s easy to track the progress of every new Coral that they plant right now, I’m learning to spot El horns are these little chicken cutlets? Those are all corals that so this is this is one of this is one of the two main species that we work with and when we outplant them like this. Yes, they look like little chicken tenders or or pieces of you get in a KFC bucket or something, but eventually they’ll grow into really large branching plating colonies. The team documents their work sites over time to assess progress. Here’S that same location.
A year later you skip to a year, and now we’re really close in some parts to getting Fusion, which is where the corals that are the same, that are clones of each other. The same genetic strain will fuse together and create that really strong, almost lattice structure that these colonies are known for and from there they just grow out and up and really create a complex three-dimensional, habitat um that also protects from erosion and and storm surge and things Like that, so so, you’re seeing the the birth of a reef you’re, seeing the birth of the reef and even more important we’re able to see it in the context of a full area, a full habitat, not just any habitat, where looking at a place called Sombrero Reef, it’s a spot where temperature spiked so fast this summer the corals died before they even had a chance to bleach and and we’re looking at Sombrero Reef. The you know, I remember the name.
This is one of the hardest hit areas right yeah. Absolutely there are, unfortunately, a lot of these corals that that don’t exist anymore, but there are a few that remain, and just because one summer, the bleaching event at samur was so bad that it killed a bunch of corals. That doesn’t mean we don’t go and try and restore Sombrero. It just means that we’ve got our work cut out for us going forward. One thing is clear: conservationists can’t just think about getting through next summer or the summer after that they need a long-term backup plan.
Too, a fail safe in case. Nothing else Works we’re headed into West Palm Beach and we’re visiting another organization with a completely different strategy for saving coral reefs, so welcome to the reef Institute. The Reef Institute is a land-based research and restoration facility like the Keys Marine Lab.
They took and rescued corals from CRF nurseries, and these are the elorn and storn elorn and storn in here. But, unlike the corals at Keys, some of the fragments here will become permanent residents very permanent. I I was just curious how long you can keep them here I mean: are we talking decades, hundreds of years Welcome to our Eternal pets? Each piece of this Coral is actually a colony of tiny, identical animals. Individuals die, but the colony can keep growing indefinitely by cloning new individuals. They could live here forever and that’s our goal. Um. It’S called a Mother Colony, so you always keep a piece of the genetics um kind of aside.
The really amazing thing about coral as an animal is that if everything continues to go sideways in the ocean, welcome to Groundhog Day we can, we can keep starting over. Should it come to that the Eternal pets could repopulate reefs, a couple of ways break a coral into fragments and the fragments will grow into their own colonies? That’S how CRF grows so many corals so quickly. So we don’t know how often that will be, but once a year once every couple of years, uh pieces of these corals will keep going back out to replenish. The ocean corals can also reproduce sexually by spawning learning. To control that process will help conservationists build healthier.
More diverse reefs and it could produce corals that are more resilient to extreme heat. These were born in the spring. These are just a couple months old for now, their raising babies spawned at other rescue centers thousands of them in this cradle. You need a microscope to see each individual see it in theory. If corals vanish from the sea, these babies could bring them back.
It’S one way to undo Armageddon which might sound like dystopian science fiction, but that’s not how lenita sees it. Do you ever find yourself fighting this kind of narrative that, if you’re doing this youve sort of given up a little bit on what’s happening in the ocean, 100 % um, I always say it’s a both and approach, and it’s going to take all of us to Do the work it doesn’t look very exciting. It looks like a bunch of tanks with a bunch of fuzzy rocks, but this is what hope looks like this is what the future of coral looks like at the end of the day. There’S no Silver Bullet for saving coral reefs success still depends on what’s happening in The Wider world, on whether we can give these corals a better home in the ocean.
Get rid of pollution, stop temperatures from rising much higher. It all needs to come together. You know, sometimes you wonder, is there really anything you can do about it? We all need to try to reduce those carbon emissions, so hopefully we can slow.
Some of this temperature change um give these corals a chance to adapt to the the new world. This isn’t Indy’s first Coral crisis when she began this work some 20 years ago, she had to race to save another species, called pillar Coral. Those are those are my babies, uh you they really are.
We actually saw some pillar corals at The Reef Institute over the years. They’Ve been decimated by a disease that tore through the local population. Today they’re considered functionally extinct in Florida’s reefs, but with Cindy’s help.
Some of them are still in Jean Banks. Today we may not have wild pillar Coral out here in Florida anymore or not very much of it, but we’ve got over 500 chunks of it in our partners are holding it in these landbased nurseries and they’re spawning in captivity. So there’s there’s the Silver Lining.
It’S the kind of story that everyone here in the keys is working so hard to avoid to give elorn and other species a different fate, but it also shows what happens when people who care about these corals refuse to give up. They find a way. A few weeks after we visited CRF began to return rescued corals to the Sea, about 1300 corals survived long enough on land to make the trip whatever happens to them next fenor and all the others will react and adapt and go from there it’s all.
They can do we definitely better prepared to respond to the next bleaching of EV, which there is a certainty that is going to happen again. This is not the first time that I, for instance, I lost corals, but every time we come back stronger, .