Dr. Cindy Lewis from Keys Marine Laboratory joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on at the lab.
Keys Marine Lab is in the city of Layton.
Dr. Lewis said, “We’ve been there since 1991, actually serving the education and science community for all of the colleges and universities around the state of Florida and beyond, almost every single state in the country, save maybe eight or 10, have not been to Keys Marine Lab over the last 30 years. So we provide the infrastructure. We have dormitory space. We have vessels with science staff that captain these vessels and get them out to the reef so they can explore the different marine environments for their projects. We usually have about 150 different groups on site throughout the year, more than 800 people. It’s a pretty far reaching program.”
A major donor just helped with the building fund.
Dr. Lewis said, “We have a building project at Keys Marine Lab. We’ve wanted to do this for the last 20 years, we desperately need to elevate our buildings, and so our 10 year master plan is to elevate our old buildings, some of them are 75 years old, and try to make them more storm resistant and storm hardened for the future so we can continue providing these services. We recently had a donation from the Lookout Foundation, first major donation, $50,000 specifically dedicated to our new building fund. We’re pretty excited about this. The new building will make us more storm resistant and storm hardened by elevating these buildings. But one phase of this is to build a new dormitory space, short term dormitory for students and faculty, so that we can increase our capacity and increase our reach to the different education and research groups around the state and the country. So increasing capacity is going to be a big part of it, and we’re currently working with our representative, Jim Mooney, to sponsor an appropriations request for the initial planning phase of this, which would be like developing the actual blueprints and plans and planning, so it’d be shovel ready when we get the next section of funding to be able to do the dorms. So we’re kind of doing it in small bites, phased approach and this donation was a huge step forward.”
The Keys Marine Lab is kind of a nicely kept secret in our area.
Dr. Lewis said, “We like to joke that what goes on behind the brown fence, because we’re not typically open to the public, we have a small staff, and with our heads down and feet churning, we’re trying to serve our education, research and restoration community, and there’s not a lot of extra bandwidth to open the facility to the public, although we do that once a year at our open house in March.”
Disturbance monitoring is also going on.
Dr. Lewis said, “This is probably a little known fact. Nobody knows what’s going on under the water, but the scientists up and down the reef track from Broward County all the way to the Dry Tortugas, every year since 2005 have had this, it’s morphed into what they call the Disturbance Response Monitoring Survey, where everybody and all these different scientists from local, state federal agencies are assigned certain specific sites to go and monitor every year between August and October. This initiative is spearheaded by Florida Fish and Wildlife, the facility in Marathon, their research facility in Marathon. They coordinate this. They typically do about 600 sites across the reef track, and this occurs between August and October, during our peak times when we’re most likely to see coral bleaching, or when the coral reef is going to be under thermal stress. But also that’s typically when incidents and evidence of disease is out there. So this survey is trying to capture this and give a snapshot of what the reefs look like, the status of the reefs each year at the same time. It’s a cross section between near shore reef areas and offshore reef areas, all up and down the coast. It’s amazing. It’s a huge project. They come out with a recap of the whole thing at the end of the year, after they’ve digested all these surveys and all the data. But it’s really important, and gives us a baseline each year, what direction the reef is heading, but maybe more importantly, say after the event of 2023 when we had that massive bleaching event on the reef with a lot of coral loss as a result of the high water temperatures, we can go back like four to six months later, after we’ve already done these surveys, in August, September, October, we can go back in the wintertime, say, February, and revisit a small subset of those same sites and see how they fared six months later after an event. So that’s the disturbance part of the monitoring. They did something similar after Hurricane Irma. That’s another form of disturbance that the reefs are experiencing. So they sent all these scientists out, all these divers out four months later to see what are the reefs look like after this has happened.”
This kind of monitoring allows us to understand how the reef is faring year to year.
Dr. Lewis said, “It’s very consistent. That’s the same survey protocols. Everybody’s doing the same survey protocol. So they can be compared up and down the reef, and from year to year. KML has participated in this program for the last 15 years. So we send divers out. We’re assigned 15 to 20 sites that we have to go and survey each year and submit that data. So it’s really nice to be able to participate in this entire project.”
What is the health of the overall ecosystem?
Dr. Lewis said, “I think we all are aware that it’s death by 10,000 cuts. There’s so many issues, so many stressors on our reef, given where we are, it’s not just the fact that we have warmer waters in the summer, but actually warmer waters in the winter, too. Nutrients, the water quality itself. Sometimes it’s high salinity events in the bay that wash out onto the reef twice a day with a falling tide, that’s another stressor. People dropping anchors on the reef. These are all things. So our reef ecosystem is in a very precarious moment, and at the moment, all the efforts of our restoration partners have been huge to try to put the finger in the dike and try to stem the tide just a little bit, give us a little bit of time to try to let some areas of these reefs recover. Even this summer, it was a hot summer, we all know that, and the waters were hot and the corals were stressed. All this restoration work that’s been done out there, they were stressed. Actually, when the water gets too warm, the restoration partners are not allowed to continue out planting on the reef until the water gets cooler. It’s just too much stress on the brand new corals that they put out there. So instead, they’ve been working behind the scenes and creating just at Keys Marine Lab alone, they created over 10,000 fragments this summer. All the different agencies working at our facility in our temperature controlled seawater system, basically holding these brand new fragments. So they’re going to be ready to go out in the fall, probably very soon, in the next couple of weeks, they should be begin out planting efforts again.”
KML is actually growing new coral.
Dr. Lewis confirmed, “Our restoration partners, they use our tables, and actually, through some grant funding, through DEP, to actually support the operations and maintenance of our tables. These tables are expensive to run. Our electric bill is through the roof. It takes staff to to do all the things like keep the pumps running, keep the water running, keep the filters running, and everything else. So DEP has helped to support some of our tables for use by our restoration partner so that they don’t have to pay for the use of these tables. It’s been a great partnership for the last two years.”
Is the federal shut down affecting KML?
Dr. Lewis said, “We’re not being directly impacted by it, because we are supported by our own auxiliary but where we are seeing it is the researchers that typically book, or the classes that have funding, to come and use KML. We’re seeing a decrease in the scheduling, decrease in the booking. So I think they’re feeling it. The people that utilize KML are feeling the crunch, and so we’re the trickle down effect.”
There were 30 students over the weekend at KML from the Florida Gulf Coast.
Dr. Lewis said, “These are our college students exploring the marine ecosystem. Prior to that, we had another class from the Florida Southern College. That professor brings a class down twice a year, and they were just here. So we are busy, and we do have a couple researchers, one new researcher from Yale University coming to us shortly to study of all things Portuguese man o’war. I don’t know anything about this project yet. It’s a new project for us, and then long time researcher, Dr. Dean Grubbs will be coming in November to monitor and tag the sawfish, as he’s been doing for decades at KML.”
For more information, click here: https://www.fio.usf.edu/keys-marine-lab/