Scientists hope transplants will revive coral reef off Fort Lauderdale
WASHINGTON – Marine scientists on Friday plan to begin transplanting about 100 basketball-size corals from an onshore nursery to a damaged reef off the shores of Fort Lauderdale.
The transplant, among the first of its kind, will be closely watched to determine whether corals that grow quickly in tanks on land can be used to restore severely depleted reefs that line the coast from the Florida Keys through Palm Beach County.
Scientists and federal officials hope such transplants will help save the reefs — and a wide array of marine life in Florida and elsewhere — from disease, global warming, ship traffic, pollution and potential oil spills.
This research is especially timely because of widespread concerns about offshore oil drilling that began last month off the north coast of Cuba about 56 miles from Florida.
"Having an onshore nursery gives you a repository, protected from whatever happens off shore," said Abby Renegar of the National Coral Reef Institute in Dania Beach, who is leading the research. "Case in point: if we have an oil spill in Cuba and we have massive mortality [of corals] offshore, our corals onshore are protected from all of that."
Federal officials are considering similar methods to restore damaged reefs near Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and elsewhere.
"In terms of coral restoration, it's big," said John Christensen, reef conservation manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "This [coral transplant] is one of the major tools to get things done, and it definitely speeds up restoration."
The South Florida transplant, he said, will "infuse genetic diversity into a place where not much exists, making it possible for corals to reproduce sexually. If these grow up successfully, their eggs and sperm will go into currents and reseed a much larger area."
The transplant builds on similar experiments in the Florida Keys and near Ruskin along Florida's west coast, but this will be the first in a highly developed urban zone like Broward County, where the reefs and sea life are stressed by huge ships passing through Port Everglades.
Two-inch fragments of staghorn coral taken from reef colonies off Broward County — about 500 in all — have been growing for more than a year in four 400-gallon tanks filled with treated seawater at the Reef Institute in Dania Beach. They grow about twice as fast in the tanks as they do in the wild.
The first batch will be transplanted to a reef badly damaged by disease about three miles north of the port and a half-mile from shore. They will be attached to the bottom of the existing reef using a cement mixture. Another 100 corals will be transplanted from a separate offshore nursery near the reef, and both batches will be monitored to see how they compare and how well they thrive.
"These corals are hard and spiky and provide an excellent home for juvenile fish," Renegar said. "They are protected from predators who can't get to them."
Coral reefs provide habitat or a food source for 25 percent of ocean species, said Richard Dodge, director of the Reef Institute. But roughly half of the world's and U.S. reefs have been degraded or died over the last several decades, he said, much of it from disease, fertilizer runoff and other pollution.
"Our reefs have always been more sparse than in the Keys, because Palm Beach County is near the northern limit [of where coral can grow]," Dodge said. "That makes them very good candidates for study to understand the effects."
What's more, he said, coral reef ecosystems in South Florida generate an estimated $7 billion a year and 71,000 jobs, mostly related to tourism, diving, snorkeling, boating and fishing.
The research is funded by state grants of $25,000, supplemented by Uncle Sam and foundations.
The nursery has proven so productive that the Reef Institute plans to expand it to grow as many as 7,000 corals, turning it, in effect, into a coral farm that can help replace depleted reefs all along the coastline.
"You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket," Dodge said. "If you have an on-land nursery, at least you have some corals that are happy and healthy in an aquarium situation that you can use to repopulate a damaged reef."
Wgibson@Tribune.com or 202-824-8256
