Mote in the New York Times — A Lifesaving Transplant for Coral Reefs

AS PUBLISHED IN

ON NOV. 23, 2014

A LIFESAVING TRANSPLANT FOR CORAL REEFS

BY RICHARD MORIN

D

avid Vaughan plunges his right arm down to his elbow into one of nine elevated tanks where thousands of tiny colonies of coral are growing at an astonishing rate in shaded seclusion next to the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory.

“Now this is the exciting part. You ready for this?” he asks, straining to be heard over the relentless hiss of filtered saltwater squirting from a maze of pipes and plastic tubing into the shallow fiberglass tank the size of a dining-room table.

Dr. Vaughan, a marine biologist who is Executive Director of the laboratory, retrieves a flat rock from the bottom. A chocolate-brown colony of brain coral, nearly 8 inches wide, has grown on the stony surface, its distinctive fleshy, serpentine folds nearly covering the rock.

Other species grown from tiny coral seeds in the Mote lab have developed even faster — up to 50 times their normal rate.

Dr. Vaughan and a Staff Biologist, Christopher Page, say this quick-grow technique, called microfragmenting, may make it possible to mass-produce reef-building corals for transplanting onto dead or dying reefs that took centuries to develop — perhaps slowing or even reversing the alarming loss of corals in the Florida Keys and elsewhere.

“This is real,” Dr. Vaughan said. “This potentially can be a fix.”

Other scientists are excited, too. While there are other efforts around the world to grow new coral, “this is easily the most promising restoration project that I am aware of,” said Dr. Billy

A year ago, the colony began as inch-and-a-half-wide coral fragments cut with a band saw from the same parent colony. As if doused with a growth elixir, these coral “seeds” began to grow 25 times as fast as they would in the wild.

Causey, a coral expert who oversees all federal marine sanctuar-

And when arranged a few inches apart on the rock, the mini-colonies quickly advanced across the surface and fused to become a single grapefruit-sized organism that continues to grow.

“Dave and Chris are buying us time,” he added. “This will keep

ies in the Southeastern United States, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

corals out there” until “we can come to understand what is happening to coral on the larger scale.”

MOTE MARINE LABORATORY

Replanting: (left) Scientists transplant microfragments of corals in Mote’s restoration site off Big Pine Key. Growing: (right) Hundreds of microfragments of corals grow in a raceway at Mote’s laboratory on Summerland Key.

Still, even Dr. Vaughan’s cheery optimism has its limits. A quarter of the earth’s corals have disappeared in recent decades, and the Mote scientists say no one can predict what will happen if the oceans continue to warm, pollution and acidification increase, overfishing further decimates species beneficial to coral, and land runoff continues to reduce the amount of life-giving sunlight that reaches the bottom.

“We do not know if this is a fix-all,” Page said. “At worst, we’re buying a little time. At best, we could restore the ecosystem.”

LIVING ROCKS On a breezy, sun-washed day, Dr. Vaughan, 61, welcomed a visitor to the Mote laboratory here, about 25 miles up the road from Key West.

He wore the uniform of the Keys — shorts, flip-flop sandals and a billowy white shirt. His shoulder-length hair, sun-bleached beard and weathered face speak of a lifetime working in the sun and saltwater.

For the past three years, he and Page have focused on “massive” corals, the species that create most of the structure on a living reef.

These corals have proved less susceptible than other species to the effects of rising ocean temperatures, pollution and changes in water chemistry.

But unlike fast-growing branching corals, massive species like brain, star, boulder and mounding corals naturally grow less than 2 inches a year — so slowly they are nicknamed “living rocks.”

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Scientists and marine aquaculturists are successfully growing staghorn and other branching corals in offshore nurseries for replanting in the wild. But until now, the slow growth rate of massive corals has stymied all efforts to produce these species in sufficient quantities for reef restoration.

The research facility over which Dr. Vaughan presides looks more like an oil refinery than a laboratory. A pump sucks up ancient seawater trapped in the porous limestone 80 feet below ground. The water is first treated in two 1,000-gallon fiberglass tanks to remove traces of ammonia, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Then it flows through a maze of 4-inch PVC pipes and into 30 outdoor 180-gallon fiberglass tanks, called raceways. A fine-mesh canopy over the tanks shades them from the subtropical sun.

In nine of these raceways, more than 7,000 brain, star, boulder and mounding corals grow in neat rows on different surfaces: cement pucks, specially manufactured ceramic wafers, or travertine tiles from the local Home Depot. Each had grown from a microfragment about the size of a pencil eraser.

THE ‘EUREKA MISTAKE’ Dr. Vaughan stumbled upon the microfragmenting idea eight years ago. He was transferring colonies of elkhorn coral between aquariums in his lab. He reached to the bottom of a tank to retrieve a colony growing on a 2-inch concrete puck.

“Part of the coral had grown over the back side and had attached to the bottom of the aquarium,” he said. When he grabbed it, “it

broke off and left two or three polyps behind. I thought I just killed those. But oh, well, I moved the puck over.”

A week later he happened to glance at the abandoned polyps — the individual hydra-shaped, genetically identical organisms that make up a coral colony — on the bottom of the aquarium.

“I noticed that those one to three polyps were now five to seven polyps,” he said. “They not only had lived — they had grown and had doubled in size.”

It was, he said, “my eureka mistake.” He cut a few more polyps from the original colony and placed them on other pucks. “And they grew like crazy. The coral seems to want to repair itself quickly and grow back over its lost ground before something else takes its territory.”

But it wasn’t until Page was hired in 2011 that Dr. Vaughan first applied this insight to the large-scale production of massive corals.

Page, 29, had raised corals in an aquarium as a teenager in Buffalo. He knew that hobbyists and live-coral dealers routinely split growing colonies into pieces to sell or trade. “This was something that could be done,” he said. “I had done it as a hobbyist. It was a chance to apply what I had done on a much larger scale and actually accomplish something big.”

Three years later, he said, he can produce 1,000 microfragments just 1 centimeter square (one-sixth of a square inch) in four days.

And with more space and adequate funding, he added, “the sky’s the limit.”

Will these coddled corals survive in the wild? Early tests have been encouraging. More than a year after they were transplanted to offshore test sites, 134 of 150 colonies grown from microfragments continue to flourish, Page said.

Last year, he planted eight fragments of brain coral on 18 dead coral “heads” — colonies of genetically identical polyps — each about two feet wide.

“They’re doing well,” he said. “They’re sheeting over the entire structure really nicely. In a year or maybe two from now, you will see one continuous colony that would have taken 15 to 30 years to grow” in the wild.

And Dr. Vaughan said he planned to place 200 coral tiles on a dead 1,000-year-old coral head “the size of a Volkswagen” in hopes of restoring it in just a year.

“Sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?” he said with a chuckle.

CREATING A CORAL THICKET In June, Mote scientists won federal approval to begin their most ambitious project yet — to create a living coral thicket on the limestone skeleton of a dead reef half a mile off Big Pine Key, just east of Key West.

They have started planting 4,000 nursery-raised corals — symmetrical brain, boulder star, great star and massive starlet — on the 2.5-acre test site. Those species will join more than 1,000

Staghorn Coral: (left) A member of the Combat Wounded Veteran Challenge transplants a staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, fragment grown in Mote’s nursery to a site off Big Pine Key. Star Coral: (right) These colonies of mountainous star coral, Orbicella faveolata, have been grown using a new technique developed at Mote, which for the first time is working on large-scale restoration of boulder corals in the FLorida Keys.

Joe Berg/Way Down Video.

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staghorn coral raised in Mote’s offshore nursery by a team led by another Staff Scientist, Erich Bartels.

The goal, Dr. Vaughan said, is to create “in a very short period of time a reef like the reefs we remember” from decades ago.

The project, among the largest coral restorations ever attempted, is the first large-scale effort in the Keys, and one of the few in the world, to restore massive corals in the wild, Dr. Vaughan said. It is partly supported by a $35,000 grant from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

By late October, the Mote team had transplanted a total of 720 nursery corals to the offshore site in three separate plantings roughly a month apart.

The first planting, on July 25, was a disaster. Parrotfish found the nursery-raised corals particularly tasty. While some colonies were untouched, most “got chomped,” Page said.

The researchers adjusted their technique. Instead of transplanting corals directly from the nursery to the test site, they temporarily placed them under wire cages near their intended permanent homes.

“They are doing fantastic,” Page said. “Predation significantly decreased after they acclimatized to site conditions” and were then relocated to the test site — perhaps because of subtle shifts in the color of the colonies, changes in their internal chemistry or other factors. (Color matters, the scientists found. Predators seemed to pass up darker corals in favor of fluorescent green ones.)

Planting will continue indefinitely. The researchers want to identify the corals that fare best, and to determine the ideal length of time needed to acclimate each species to make them less attractive to hungry fish.

If successful, they plan to use their nursery-raised corals to restore other degraded reef sites throughout the Keys and train others to set up their own coral factories.

But as Page noted, time is running out. “This may be our last, best chance,” he said.

— This story originally appeared in The New York Times ‘Science Times’ section. It is reprinted here with permission from The New York Times Co.

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Joe Berg/Way Down Video.

Underwater: State Rep. Holly Merrill Raschein, R-Key Largo, visited Mote’s Tropical Research Laboratory on Summerland Key last year and had the opportunity to dive in Mote’s coral restoration nursery. She came away educated and inspired. “Mote’s Tropical Research Lab is absolutely incredible,” she said. “The groundbreaking research Mote has been able to produce with limited resources in their lab on Summerland Key is amazing. Their multifaceted research approach and big-picture focus foretells a bright future for our reefs.”

MOTE FIGHTING DECLINES IN CORAL HEALTH Worldwide, coral species are facing severe threats from warming ocean waters, ocean acidification, pollution and disease. Many reefs are in significant decline — with losses of up to 90 percent for some species.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in the fall of 2014 new protections for coral with the listing of 20 new species as “threatened” — including five species found in the Florida Keys where Mote Marine Laboratory has been studying coral ecosystems and developing new restoration methodologies for more than 15 years.

Florida’s reef — the only barrier reef system in the continental U.S. — underpins the state’s marine ecosystems, draws $6.3 billion to our economy and protects our coastlines from major storms.

The reef is at the heart of Mote’s world-class research focused on the conservation and sustainable use of our ocean’s natural resources. As the southernmost marine laboratory in the continental U.S., Mote’s lab in the Keys is uniquely positioned to support the study and restoration of Florida’s coral reef system.

While Mote scientists are attacking the issues that coral species face on a number of fronts, the Keys lab also serves as an important and unique base of operations for other researchers from around the world who are also working to restore and protect reefs.

Learn more about Mote coral research online at mote.org/coraloverview.

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