Earlier this month, researchers at the Florida Aquarium took the first steps toward restoring some of the coral off the Florida Keys that died during a record heat wave two years ago.
They transplanted Elkhorn coral that had been plucked from the ocean before that coral bleaching event and placed it in their lab in Apollo Beach. That lab made history by becoming the first land-based facility to spawn Elkhorns.
These baby corals, all born in 2022 and 2023 at the aquarium, came from rescued parent colonies originally from the Florida Reef.
READ MORE: A 'catastrophe' in the Lower Keys: Summer heatwave wipes out iconic elkhorn coral
Keri O'Neil is the director of the Aquarium's coral conservation program. She said they also found heat-resistant Elkhorns off the coast of Central America, and they hope to breed new species that could be the key to staving off their extinction.
O'Neil spoke with WUSF in more detail about the program.
This conversation has been lightly edited for content and length.
A couple years ago, your lab in Apollo Beach became the first facility anywhere to spawn Elkhorn corals on land. You all just transplanted them to a bunch of places in the Keys. Tell us about that.
We were the first facility to actually induce Elkhorn corals to spawn in the laboratory, and we just transported over 1,000 juvenile Elkhorn corals that were born at our center in Apollo Beach in 2022 and 2023.
We've been growing these for a couple years now because we didn't want to release them right before or during the marine heat wave that occurred in 2023, so we were holding on to them.
They have many different parents. Some of those parents were brought to us at the beginning of that heat wave, actually, when people realized how devastating that was going to potentially be for Elkhorn coral that summer.
And there are entire swaths of the keys that we don't see anymore Elkhorn. Is that right?
Yeah, we lost pretty much everything south of the Upper Keys, so all of the Elkhorn corals in the Middle Keys and Lower Keys suffered complete mortality in 2023 and even the ones in the Upper Keys did. There was some mortality, but there are still some left. ,
I think the latest study said we're down to about 37 individuals that were alive on Florida's coral reef, and many of them are so far apart from each other that they can't actually produce offspring successfully anymore.
So by having these corals safeguarded on land, it not only preserves the genetic diversity of the population, but also allows us to breed them and make new pairs and new pairs of parents, and try to find those resilient offspring that might be a little bit stronger and able to better survive in the future.
You all got some corals from Central America, I believe that they are kind of used to the hotter temperatures. Is this part of the program to maybe find places where it's unusually hot, where they have survived and transplant them to places like the Keys?
Exactly. That is the hope. Our partners at the University of Miami and Dr. Andrew Baker's lab were able to import some fragments of Elkhorn coral from a very warm coastal bay called Tela Bay in Honduras. And kudos to them that they were able to bring those living pieces in and in great condition. And they have half of them, and we have half of them.
So we hope we can breed those corals with Florida corals, and that those babies may carry even better genes, maybe better genetics, or even the algae that lives inside their tissue. Maybe it's that that's stronger and makes them more resilient to warm temperatures.
So there's still a lot to learn with this. We don't totally understand what genes cause a coral to be more heat tolerant, but we've made a ton of progress on this. I think that we can get there.
Temperatures aren't going to get any cooler. So is this the new normal? Are we going to have to do this every year with various coral species to stave off their extinction?
Well, when we look at 2023 was extremely unusually hot, and that tends to occur for us during El Nino years. But, yeah, we don't expect it to get any better. Who knows what the next El Niño years are going to bring for Florida? So I do think that for some species, they need this human intervention to have a chance to be able to survive on our reefs.
" I do think that for some species, they need this human intervention to have a chance to be able to survive on our reefs."
Now, that being said, there's a lot of very weedy and tolerant coral species out there and that are able to live through this, but they're not necessarily the primary reef-building species that form, you know, large reefs that create good habitats. So it's not like the entire reef is going to be lost. But we just really are working on these really important, primary framework-building species.
Elkhorn corals are akin to what they call charismatic species. They're beautiful, right? They're big, and they wave in the waves.
If a coral could be charismatic, then the Elkhorn coral is one of them.
They're called Elkhorn for a reason. They have very large branches that look like the horns on an elk. And they can grow to be huge colonies. And their branch structure actually breaks wave energy, very, very well.
So historically, the corals would grow right up to the water surface and are really these primary species that break wave energy and protect the coastline.
Why should people care about corals? Most people never see them. They never go diving. Why is this so important to the health of marine life in general?
The coral reefs are the rainforest of the sea, and the corals are akin to the trees that make the rainforest.
They're the primary habitat that all the other species depend on. When the coral animal dies, that reef begins to erode and will actually become more and more flat over time, so you no longer have habitat for all the other fish species, lobsters that like to live in reefs. And then you lose that wave energy breaking function.
They really are nature's seawall. And then we spend so much money in trying to protect our beaches and our coastlines and building artificial structures, because when the natural reef is lost, you use, you lose that natural protection.
Are you confident that you can make a difference in the long run, and not just a kind of band-aid approach here?
Oh, I believe that. You know, we're setting the groundwork now. If you look at what's been done for terrestrial plant and animal species, people have been selectively breeding for things for hundreds and hundreds of years, and we're just scratching the surface of that with coral.
So who really knows what's possible with this? But I believe that people are still going to be breeding corals, trying to understand their traits and their genetics and how they can breed for those for hundreds of years to come.
Anything else you'd like to mention?
I'd like to thank all of the partners who work together on this. We can't do this in a vacuum, with Coral Restoration Foundation, Reef Renewal, Mote Marine Laboratory and Sustainable Oceans and Reefs.
These guys are going to continue to culture these corals in their nurseries, get them back out on the reef, and then we'll monitor them, and we'll see what lives through the next heat wave, and then we get more information. And we couldn't do it without our partners.
Copyright 2025 WUSF 89.7
