After mass coral die-off, Florida scientists rethink plan to save ailing reefs

Four years ago, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled a $100 million coral moonshot. Over 2 decades, nearly half a million hand-reared coral colonies would be planted on seven ailing reefs in southern Florida, in a bid to revive them. Mission: Iconic Reefs represented “one of the largest ever investments in coral restoration,” Pat Montanio, then head of the agency’s habitat conservation program, said at the time. Today, the project looks as ailing as the coral it was meant to save. A record-breaking underwater heat wave that swept the Caribbean and southern Florida in 2023 killed most of the transplanted colonies. Elkhorn coral, with its sprawling, flat branches, was to be the cornerstone of the initiative’s first phase, creating a foundation on which other corals could grow. Instead it proved to be one of the most heat sensitive species. Many elkhorn corals, both wild and hand planted, are dead, their blanched skeletons coated in algae. “The picture is not good,” says Jennifer Moore, a coral recovery coordinator at NOAA who helped lead a January meeting in Marathon, Florida, not far from one of the Iconic Reefs, to assess the damage and plot a path forward. The results are provoking a crisis of confidence in decades-old methods of reef restoration pioneered in Florida and adopted around the world. “Is it responsible to grow these species and then just put them back out to die?” asks Ian Enochs, a marine biologist...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news