Dr. Cindy Lewis, the Director of the Keys Marine Laboratories, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the lab.
What does the Keys Marine Lab do?
Dr. Lewis said, “We’re in the city of Layton, mile marker 68 and a half, right smack dab in the middle of the Keys and we are part of the Florida Institute of Oceanography, which is basically a consortium of marine and oceanographic institutions and agencies around the state of Florida. We’re part of them. They also have three ocean going vessels that are harbored up in St Pete. But here at the Keys Marine Lab, we cater to the college level students, both academic and research. So professors bring classes down to us. We get them out on the water. Researchers come down and do their research in the marine environment, as well as a lot of coral restoration, we have a big series of sea water systems that are temperature controlled for helping with propagating and out planting coral.”
Dr. Lewis was in Tallahassee for Oceans Day.
She said, “The Florida Institute of Oceanography hosts a big fish fry out on the plaza in front of the Capitol. We have any of our members that wish to set up a display so you can walk around and talk to the different consortium members, the different universities and agencies that are there to talk about the work that they’ve been doing in the ocean environment. We sponsor a fish fry. We served over 650 meals that afternoon to people that came and walked around. We also took the opportunity to meet with Representative Mooney, to talk to him about Keys Marine Lab. He’s a big supporter of the lab, and we just wanted to bring him up to speed on what was going on. So he’s our representative for Monroe County. We also had an opportunity to talk to a Representative Chaney. She’s from Pinellas County, and that’s obviously our home port up there in Pinellas County, St Petersburg. So we had an opportunity to talk with her about KML, and she was very interested.”
What are some of the programs that people will see from the lab?
Dr. Lewis said, “This was kind of exciting. We had an opportunity to schedule a tour with some members from the Key Colony Beach Fishing and Boating Club so they could learn more about what we’re doing at the lab and some of the work that we’re doing, and they went back to their membership and arrived with $1,000 check to donate to Keys Marine Lab to help support and continue the coral restoration work that everybody’s doing out of the lab. So we were extremely grateful for that opportunity, and that was wonderful. We work with all the different restoration groups here, especially in Monroe County, but Coral Restoration Foundation, Reef Renewal, ICARE, Florida Fish and Wildlife, MOTE, all of these major restoration groups, and this winter, so when the weather’s bad and the groups can’t get out on the water to actually be planting coral on the reef, they were able to be at our lab, and they were actually able to cut up corals and propagate them. They created, in a six month period of time, over 25,000 pieces of coral that they’re now bringing back out to the reef and out planting to help restore our reef. So that was a huge, huge success, I would say, on the part of everybody utilizing our sea water system.”
What does the Florida Institute of Oceanography do?
Dr. Lewis said, “We’ve been in existence since the 1960s, FIO and its consortium, and these agencies, all of the schools, state universities and private and public universities, as well as other agencies like Florida Fish and Wildlife and DEP, Ocean Alliance, they’re all part of our consortium, and they have access to the vessels or to Keys Marine Lab to do the work that they’re doing. So we try to help each other out, partner with each other and keep the great work going in the ocean.”
How can people get involved with Keys Marine Laboratories?
Dr. Lewis said, “If you’re a social media savvy, you can always follow us on Facebook or Instagram. We do have a pretty comprehensive website. These students can come and a lot of times, we don’t have internship and volunteer programs specifically at KML right now, but we have the ability to link them up with different professors or groups, especially our restoration people and they work out of KML, and so we can link them up with those opportunities. We do have an open house that we do every spring in March, open to the community. It was a huge success this year, we had over 200 people there. Again, all of our restoration and conservation groups had displays so you could walk around and interact with them, because we’re all partners in this kind of a thing.”
In the beginning of May, Florida Aquarium has an opportunity to bring down over 1,100 baby elkhorn corals.
Dr. Lewis said, “These are some of the very highly endangered species, one of the species that did not fare well during the 2023 bleaching event, but we were able to save a bunch of the adult corals, chunks of the adult corals, and they’re actually breeding them in captivity up in Tampa, at the Florida Aquarium and they’re bringing down these babies that they’ve been caring for them between two and three years now, since they spawned, and they’re going to be bringing them down to KML, and they’ll be using us basically as the distribution point and all of these corals will be partitioned out to our partners, Reef Renewal, the Coral Restoration Foundation, ICARE, FWC, Mote Marine Lab, so they’ll all be recipients of these baby corals to eventually be out planted to the reef and cared for, so we’re pretty excited about that. This is all in support of NOAA’s mission, iconic reefs project for restoring the reefs.”
For more information, click here: https://www.fio.usf.edu/keys-marine-lab/