Superhero: Ocean Reef Community

Super Hero: Ocean Reef Community Foundation

For more than 55 years, The College of the Florida Keys has continuously evolved to meet the growing need for higher education in Monroe County. Covering a service area of 126 miles (the length of the Keys), the College has worked to maximize its impact and relevance to the economies and needs of each population center in the Keys. In evaluating the needs of CFK’s service areas, it became clear that a stand-alone facility in the upper Keys was critical to the success of our students, the College, and the community’s workforce demand.

Since 2013, the College’s quest has developed through various stages from feasibility studies and educational programs review to location selection and funding consideration. Over this evolution, one important group emerged that shared the College’s vision for higher education in the Upper Keys, understood the importance of community, and was ready to “roll up their sleeves” and work toward supporting the goal of a new center in Key Largo. This extraordinary group was the Ocean Reef Community Foundation and its members. For them and their work, the College is forever grateful.

Ocean Reef Community Foundation (ORCF) and their resident-supporters have a long rich history of providing critical support to numerous non-profit organizations in the Keys and south Miami-Dade County. The spirit of charity and desire to maximize the impact of giving motivated Ocean Reef members to establish the Ocean Reef Community Foundation in 1994. ORCF’s Community Grants Program funds dozens of worthy charities in the interest areas of Education, Youth, Health & Family Services, and Community in the Upper Keys, Homestead, and Florida City each spring. Including 2020 grants, the program has donated more than $11 million to improve the quality of life in the communities where Ocean Reef employee families live since the All Charities collaboration began in 2008.

For Monroe County, Ocean Reef Community is one of the largest employers and CFK is the largest provider of higher education. A partnership between the two was a natural fit. In recent years, ORCF has supported the College’s needs for nursing lab equipment, welding education infrastructure, “Game-Changer” scholarships, apprenticeship scholarships, and most recently capital support for the Upper Keys Center.

Upon the College’s selection and purchase of the site for the Upper Keys Center, a dedicated leadership group emerged from within the Ocean Reef Community. Under the leadership of William Nutt, ORCF’s Chairman, a group of education-minded philanthropists, comprised of Alan Goldstein, Jim Anderton, Bill Parfet, Michael Berman, Steve Markel, Thomas Davidson, and Ed Hajim, answered the call to assist the College and launched an effort to raise funds. Based on the work of this extraordinary group and the Ocean Reef Community Foundation, the College recently received a $1.2 million contribution toward the Center and a pledge of another $1.2 million.

This generous support combined with a Federal EDA grant awarded to the College, CFK Foundation support, and other private assistance reaches a total of $20 million, the cost to complete the Center. Hats off to the Ocean Reef Community and all who have worked to make this dream come true. The College looks forward to a long productive partnership to benefit our students and our community.

From the left: ORCF Vice President Stephen Woodsum, CFK Vice President of Advancement Dr. Frank Wood, CFK President Dr. Jonathan Gueverra, and ORCF Grants Committee Chair Janie Sims.

Clawing for Coral

From the desk of Angelo Jason Spadaro, PhD Assistant Professor, Marine Science & Technology

Coral reefs are some of the most beautiful and biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. They only cover ~0.6% of the seafloor — an area roughly the size of Colorado — but they harbor between 25% and 33% of all marine species.

More species occur on coral reefs than just about any other type of habitat. They protect our coastlines and provide more than one billion people with food and livelihoods. They give us oxygen to breath and new medicines in the fight against cancer and other diseases. Coral reefs are inherently tied to the persistence of human existence on planet Earth. Unfortunately, however, coral reefs are in trouble.

Climate change, rising sea surface temperatures, and ocean acidification are all chronic global threats to corals. Add to that, local and regional stresses such as coastal nutrient pollution, endocrine disruptors, anchor damage, groundings, overfishing, marine diseases, increasingly destructive hurricane seasons, and many others… and the fate of coral reefs becomes increasingly uncertain. In fact, coral reef ecology has become an often bleak and depressing field of study. Imagine watching the ecosystems you have grown up admiring, and even dedicated your professional life to studying, rapidly deteriorate amid a fusillade of humaninduced insults — not fun. What does a degraded coral reef ecosystem look like? Unfortunately, here in the Florida Keys, all we need to do to answer that question is visit our backyard.

The Florida Reef Tract — the third largest barrier reef system on the planet – has undergone a steep decline over the last half-century. Unfortunately, that trend has only worsened. Numerous groups, including Mote Marine Laboratory, the Coral Restoration Foundation, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, The Nature Conservancy, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and countless others are scrambling to address the degradation of our iconic coral reef ecosystems through restoration

Clawing for Coral

and management. Typically, these groups have focused heavily on “direct” or “active” restoration which involves planting live corals in places where they once grew naturally — often referred to as “gardening” corals. Indeed, much of the theory behind coral restoration comes from silviculture — the growing and cultivation of trees. However, any gardener knows that successful gardening doesn’t stop when the trees are planted. Both trees and corals compete with weeds. In the sea, those “weeds” are algae. It may have been some time since you’ve taken a biology course, but we all know that green stuff carries out photosynthesis and photosynthesis is how we get oxygen, right? Correct — photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide and water molecules using sunlight and produces simple sugars and oxygen as byproducts. However, when you’ve got too much photosynthesis going on and not enough critters on the reef consuming those sugars…bacteria, including all of the nasty ones (and plenty that become nasty when their numbers get out of control), are able to bloom. What is normally a positive or neutral relationship between corals and microbes quickly shifts to a negative interaction — those microbial communities burn up the available oxygen stressing corals which are then easy marks for the increasingly abundant disease-causing microbes. It’s a nasty cascade of bad news for corals.

It's easy to say that algae are bad for coral reefs, but that’s not entirely true. Algae are essential to coral reef communities. They’re among the most important primary producers, they are how coral reefs capture solar energy and transmit it into the coral reef community. Without them, coral reefs could not be as diverse and abundant as they are. However, it’s a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you need enough critters eating green stuff (herbivores) to keep algae grazed — kind of like how you mow your lawn and weed your garden to keep it from being over-grown. But you also need just enough nitrogen and phosphorous in the water to keep algae going, but not so much that they get out of hand — I’m sure every gardener has over-fertilized their lawn or garden at some point and seen the weeds take advantage of it rather than the plants it was intended for.

Top photo: This large Elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) colony, located just off the west end of Carrie Bow Cay in Belize, is reminiscent of those that used to span most of the reefs in the Keys and south Florida. Inset photo: CFK Marine Science Professor Dr. Angelo “Jason” Spadaro.

Well, in your garden or lawn, it’s a relatively easy fix. You pull the weeds and leave the plants you’re gardening. In the sea, it’s a bit more complicated. It would be impractical for us to go out and physically remove excess algae from the reef — trust me, it’s a much bigger job than it sounds. Besides, there are a bunch of critters (herbivores) in the reef community whose job it is to eat all of that algae. One issue facing reefs is that there’s too much space available for algae to grow and fewer and fewer herbivores around to consume the excess.

In many places, including Florida, there are now laws against harvesting many of those herbivores. Bans on landing Parrotfish are now commonplace throughout the Caribbean. We’ve also tried for more than 35 years to re-populate Caribbean reefs with the Long Spined Sea Urchin (Diadema antillarum), a once abundant grazer whose populations collapsed in the early 1980s after a pandemic swept through the Caribbean region. Unfortunately, neither strategy has been able to keep up with the proliferation of algae on Caribbean reefs. Enter the Caribbean King Crab (Maguimithrax spinosissimus).

These mammoth spider crabs occur naturally throughout the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and along the Florida Reef Tract, but they’re not very common in most areas. They may look menacing, but they’re mostly vegetarian. In fact, not only do they eat a lot of algae — more than most parrotfish species! — but they also eat some of the really nasty chemically-defended algae that other herbivores tend to avoid. In a series of experiments that I conducted on patch reefs in the Middle Keys several years ago, the crabs reduced algae cover (the percentage of the reef surface covered in algae) by more than 85% in just 10-12 months! These were fairly spectacular results, so I replicated the study on another set of patch reefs off of Islamorada near Cheeca Rocks to make sure that the results were reproducible — and they were! Next, the Smithsonian Institution and INAPESCA (the Mexican fisheries research institution) replicated my study on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef off Mexico and Belize and once again, the crabs significantly reduced the cover of algae on the reefs where they were added. Three separate, independent experiments all confirmed our results — adding crabs works! It was more than that, though. After the crabs removed the algae, I found that more juvenile corals survived and there were more fish and more variety of fish around reefs that had crabs added than around control reefs (no crabs). Here, we’ve got the makings of a big boost to our reef’s algae problem and a way to help facilitate coral restoration efforts. There’s a catch, though.

The crabs are excellent grazers, but there aren’t many of them on the reef. A big bottleneck to “scaling up” and trying this on a grander scale in support of coral restoration is the question of — where do

Spadaro holding a large male Caribbean King Crab (Maguimithrax spinosissimus) during a trip with the Smithsonian Institution to Carrie Bow Cay in Belize.

we get the crabs? We’re hoping the answer is aquaculture. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary has included these crabs in their Mission: Iconic Reefs initiative. They have estimated a need for more than 28,000 crabs for the seven Iconic Reefs — take it from me, that is a tall order! Luckily, the crabs are excellent candidates for mariculture — their larval period is very short, they’re mostly herbivorous, and they grow relatively quickly. This is the focus of our work at The College of the Florida Keys — developing efficient and sustainable aquaculture protocols for producing crabs to support the restoration of coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean. CFK is working closely with the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) to both produce crabs and test their effects on transplanted corals in a number of habitat types in the lower Florida Keys. CFK students are currently engaged in running several laboratory experiments on campus to determine what effects diet (i.e., algal species) and environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, pH, oxygen concentrations, salinity) have on larval and juvenile crab development. The College is also currently working with the FKNMS and our partners at Mote Marine Laboratory to initiate a series of field experiments to test the effect of aquacultured and wild caught crabs on algae and on out-planted corals in several different reef habitat types south of the lower Florida Keys. These experiments are only the tip of the iceberg on a growing research program focused on facilitating restoration efforts along the Florida Reef Tract — primarily the FKNMS Mission: Iconic Reefs initiative — and on using research as a tool for training the next generation of coral reef scientists and technicians. We are very lucky at The College of the Florida Keys to have the Florida Reef Tract as both a venue for research and as a literal classroom for teaching and doing marine science.

Ready to Dive In: Swim Team Kicks Off Collegiate Sports

The College of the Florida Keys is eager to dive back into the pool of collegiate sports with its first-ever swim team after a 45-year absence on campus. With male and female athletes lined up, a junior Olympic-size swimming pool on campus, and a full-time coach in place, the southernmost college is in position to make a splash on the sports scene.

In 2019, the College became a member of the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), which is key to operate and compete in sanctioned, structured athletic events. Since then, the College has embarked on a prescribed track to prepare for athletic recruitment, training, and competition. By 2022, the College should be eligible to join the ranks of colleges across the state and nation to compete for high-level recognition.

Due to setbacks caused by the pandemic, the College is awaiting clearance from the NJCAA to begin training for its inaugural spring season in 2021. When that time comes, CFK has a plan to ensure the safety of its student athletes as they enter the water. With ample outdoor space for social distancing and no contact required to compete, there is minimal risk associated with the sport of swimming.

Eventually, the College’s swim teams will compete in regular seasons against other Florida colleges and against colleges and universities from outside the South Florida region. Several such schools already travel to Key West (especially during the winter months) to train at the College’s Aquatics Center.

Leading CFK’s swim teams will be Coach Lori Bosco, the College’s Aquatics Director. Bosco has been managing the College’s pool for more than 20 years and also serves as the coach for the Key West High School swim team. She possesses an infectious enthusiasm for the sport which is sure to inspire the future generations of swim teams that will represent The College of the Florida Keys!

Gracia Rojas (AS, Marine Env Tech), originally from Fort Myers, will be among the first athletes on CFK’s swim team.

Serving up hot coffee and fluffy biscuits, Amber Heimann (BAS, Sup & Mgt ’18) is flexing her business skills at her own coffee shop, A.M. Birds, with the business plan she developed at CFK.

CFK Means Business: Rise & Shine

There is a new way to rise and shine in the Keys, and it started right here on The College of the Florida Keys campus.

Alumni Amber Heimann opened A.M. Birds at 301 Overseas Highway after the idea came to her while she was pursuing her Associate in Arts and Bachelor of Applied Science in Supervision and Management degrees at CFK.

A.M. Birds is an eclectic local coffee shop and bakery where you can get a jumpstart on your day and delicious biscuits. It all started when Amber needed a project idea for her statistics class at CFK. Her idea was to use a large popular coffee company as a topic for research, since she thought necessary information for the business would be easily accessible. She also knew that local coffee shops were competition for the coffee giant, because of the more unique and familiar settings these offer. Amber felt drawn to the local coffee shops she frequented in Key West because of this.

Amber’s ideas developed more as she finished her A.A. and decided to pursue her B.A.S. as part of the first class of graduates in the bachelor’s degree program at CFK, where her campus community fostered her dream. In Dr. Frank Wood’s class, students were assigned a semester-long project on a business model of their choosing. “My parents had talked about buying a coffee shop down from the restaurant, and once my parents said that, I turned my whole assignment around,” Amber said. Because of this fortuitous moment, she used the coffee shop vision as the focus. With these ideas colliding, Amber’s vision was becoming a reality.

In the capstone course for the major, taught by CFK president, Dr. Jonathan Gueverra, Amber used her final semester to visualize what it was that she would do after she graduated. According to Gueverra, the assigned project was designed “to integrate all that the students had learned and demonstrate proficiency and to prepare them for that next step in their life,” with the hope they will stay and contribute to our community. “This emphasis on getting them to look locally makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger.”

For this final project, too, Amber focused on coffee, unable to shake the feeling that she would thrive in this business. This final reflection on her plans to pursue her business was reinforced with encouragement and guidance from her supportive parents. Amber was on her way!

When Amber graduated in 2018, she was chosen to deliver the student address at commencement. In that speech, she shared of her experience coming to CFK (then FKCC), “I quickly realized the difference at FKCC. The atmosphere is colorful and beautiful, teachers return your emails, know who you are, and there are so many opportunities. You can take ceramics, scuba diving, business classes, you can even learn how to cook. You can find out what you like, helping you find your path. I know I found mine.” And clearly, Amber had found her path.

On September 4, 2019, A.M. Birds opened its doors to the Florida Keys, boasting delicious coffee drinks (of course), mouth-watering pastries, and fluffy biscuits. Among the many who were there for a coffee and a biscuit and to celebrate this accomplishment were the friends Amber made in her business degree cohort. One even arrived before Amber, volunteering to get to work. “That comradery they have — they really support each other — it’s because of the manner in which we teach them,” says Gueverra. “By the time they get to the end of their programs, they aren’t just working in groups, they’re part of a team.”

The education has continued as Amber has put her ideas into practice. “Some nights I was leaving at 10:30 or 11:00. By the time I showered and got into bed, I was already back up again. As time went on, it became more of a struggle because we were barely getting any rest.” But Amber embraced the experience, and in just a few months was turning a profit.

During the time of pandemic closures, A.M. Birds has been temporarily closed and using the time to make some improvements. When A.M. Birds reopens at the beginning of the new year, there will be kitchen upgrades, an extended coffee bar, and additions to the menu.

In her experience so far, Amber has been most proud of making a name for herself. “I became known as the biscuit girl,” Amber explains. “I went into a bar and a guy pointed at me and said ‘It’s the biscuit girl!’” It is a moniker she embraces as word spreads and this CFK graduate makes her education work for her.