Dr. Cindy Lewis, the director of Keys Marine Laboratory, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the lab.
With the warmer weather, there is a workshop coming up.
Lewis said, “One of the things that we do is we have these temperature-controlled seawater systems that house a lot of our partners here in the Keys, the Coral Restoration, Reef Renewal, the Coral Restoration Foundation, ICARE, as well as the FWC branch of the restoration, and they’re all working on corals, and they hold them in our system, getting ready to move them out to offshore for all their restoration work. Many of you have heard of the impending El Nino that we’re expecting this year. It’s going to be a warm summer. We’re already seeing warm temperatures on the reef, and as we’ve seen in the past, the corals don’t do well when these waters get too extremely warm, so our restoration partners are coming together. We’re having a little bit of a workshop with all of their interns and their volunteers to kind of walk them around the seawater system, show them what we have, and some of the protocols, so that we’re prepared for this summer. We’re also talking to them about what are their contingency plans, as far as if and when they decide that they’re going to maybe bring some corals in to the land-based facilities to protect them from potentially breaching events for the summer, so we can be prepared. We have enough pumps that are circulating water in the tables. We have enough rain covers to cover the tables. When the corals are in for an extended period of time, we actually have to feed the coral, so making sure we have all of the necessary equipment and supplies ready to bring these corals in.”
Does moving the corals in make a difference?
Lewis said, “The corals that they are currently out in their nurseries that are areas out in the ocean, and so they’re hanging out there, they’re in this hot water, and there are different things that all of the practitioners do to try to protect these corals, because once they go to these nurseries directly out to the reef to be planted, and they want to preserve the genetic diversity of all the different corals that they have hanging in their nurseries, they also want to preserve the biomass, the numbers of coral that they need for the restorations to try to meet some of their target goals, so they begin to look at all these things, say, okay, which ones are the really sensitive ones, or how do we preserve some individuals, so they take a small subset of the corals they have, and identify those that are going to be brought in to protect them should we have an extreme warm weather event, like we did in 2023. Another strategy is some of the practitioners actually move some of these corals down to slightly deeper water. These corals are adapted for being in shallow water. They’re growing in shallow water between 20 and 30 feet, but if they bring them down to maybe 50 or 60 feet, where it’s just a half a degree warm cooler for them for the summertime, that may protect them from some of that thermal stress that they would see from a really hot summer, so they’ve identified which corals or which trees they’re going to move that way, and some of them are just going to tough it out in the nursery, and we’ll find out which ones are the tough ones, and the survivors should there be another heating event. So it’s really important to be prepared. In 2023 we had over 5,000 corals that were brought in just to our lab alone, let alone Mote was doing the same thing, and several of our partners up on the mainland, Florida Aquarium, the Reef Institute, University of Miami, Nova, they were all taking corals into their onshore nurseries to protect them, so it was this mass exodus and scramble, and I think we’ve learned a lot in the last three years, and we’ve identified maybe a better way to streamline it. And then, what are going to be those trigger points? It’s better, obviously, to have the corals out in the ocean, but you certainly don’t want to lose them, so when you decide it’s too hot, and are you jumping the gun? You don’t want them to be too stressed before you start to bring them in, so it’s a balancing act for everybody. In all honesty, a little bit of a hurricane or a tropical storm is not a bad thing for our reefs. Actually, that wind and water and rain and everything begins to cool the reef down just a little bit and gives the coral a reprieve if it’s only for a week or two. So, a little bit of storm activity is not a bad thing, but it’s a balancing act against the warming oceans that we’re seeing, and already seeing, last week we were under a bleach watch. The winds that we had over Memorial Day weekend dropped the temperature just a half a degree on the reef, so the coral isn’t quite so stressed, but we’re expecting once the winds go back to normal, and we have our warm sunshine, and everything else, everything’s going to warm back up again.”
Some of the facilities at the lab are in the process of getting an upgrade.
Lewis said, “We are in the fundraising stage, and we’ve had several very generous donations to begin our building fund for the new building. Stage one is going to be building a new dormitory facility, so we can increase our capacity, have more students, more researchers on site, so that they can use the facility and get out to the reefs and do their work, and then phase two would be to tear down four of our old buildings. Some of these buildings are 75 years old, and they’ve done well, they’ve survived many hurricanes, but they’re showing signs of wear and tear, and so we’d like to replace them with elevated storm hardened buildings and actually be able to increase capacity there as well. We’ve broken it down into two phases, and we’re seeking state and federal funding as well as private donors for it.”
Is summer a busy time for the lab?
Lewis said, “Summertime can be our busiest time, pretty much starting from spring break in March or early April, when everybody has time away from school, but then once school is out, or in the summer sessions, a lot of our researchers are down doing their research. Grad students are on site for an extended period of time, maybe a month or two, doing their research. So summertime is a very busy time for us, and we’ve been at close to full capacity ever since March. Everybody keep your eyes on the reef. I’m maybe aware that there is a coral bleach watch, and that’s a sort of a citizen science. If you see anything that looks unusual, you can report it through the bleach watch, and it gives them eyes on the water up and down the Keys, because you can’t be everywhere at once.”
For more information, click here: https://www.fio.usf.edu/keys-marine-lab/