Corals Return to Keys - Jason Spadaro - MOTE

Scientists with Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota have been returning corals to Florida Bay, after they were removed because unusually high temperatures were causing the coral to bleach. The corals have been kept in onshore farms in the Keys and near Sarasota. There's also a promising sign with some corals resisting bleaching in the heat. We speak with Mote Program Manager Dr. Jason Spadaro.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Gordon Bird here with Beyond the News. Sarasota's Moat Marine Lab has been working
on coral refrustoration for decades. Ithas been running for offshore nurseries in the
Florida Keys, and it had toremove the coral to Sarasota earlier this year
because of unprecedented hot water in FloridaBay. Now the water has cooled down,
the corals are being brought back,and we have doctor Jason Spedero,

(00:21):
who is the manager of mote's coralrefrustoration research program, and doctor Spadero,
welcome back. This is at leastyour second time on Beyond the News.
Absolutely, thank you, Gordon,thanks for having me. Well. Now,
the water off the Keys has certainlywarmed up every summer. Tell us
how different before we get into wherethings stand right now, how different and

(00:43):
apparently unique this event was to compelyou to move the coral out of harm's
way, right, Thank you.So we recognize that seawater temperatures were getting
higher than normal all the way backin May and June this year, and
it wasn't so much that the temperaturesgot higher than usual, though they did.

(01:06):
It was the early onset and thelong duration of those those elevated temperatures
that were particularly alarming. Excuse me. And Florida Bay, as you mentioned,
is essentially a huge thermal battery.So during during summers like this this
past summer, where we have alminioconditions, a very very little wind for

(01:29):
long periods of time, that shallowexpansive basin basically becomes a big heat sink
and evaporation continues, but there's nothingthere's there was very little rain this summer
and very little wind to cool thingsoff. So that water in Florida Bay
got very hot and very salty,and normally cooler water sits on the bottom.

(01:51):
You know, it's more dense thanthe warmer water. But when you
have hyper saline or very salty waterthat is also very hot, it is
more dense than the than than thewarmer water off shore. So as that
water came out of Florida Bay,it sat on the bottom and slid back
and forth across the reef. Andthat's what that's what we really think hit

(02:15):
our first nursery. That kind ofthat kind of lit the fuse on this
massive coral evacuation event. Was veryvery salty, very hot, very I
mean low dissolved oxygen and high dissolvedorganic content water hit our nursery off of
Blue Key, and in the spanof about forty eight hours, nearly one

(02:37):
hundred percent of the corals and thatnursery bleached, which is which is unusual
and it was very alarming. Soin response to that, we we almost
immediately enacted the largest coral evacuation toour knowledge in history and started evacuating all
of the corals from all of ournurseries that that we could save. And

(03:00):
we managed to bring in thousands ofcorals, but that very hot, very
salty, very kind of you know, bad water conditions water resulted in most
of those corals coming in being dyeingor at least very very severely stressed.

(03:21):
And tell us what conditions the coralshave been under, I guess undergoing rehab
at your aquaculture facility in Sarasota whereyou brought them. Yes. Yes,
So the idea was that we broughtthose corals into our land based facilities in
the Florida Keys, but those arealso production facilities, so they filled up
very quickly and the overflow the remainingbiomass that we evacuated was brought up to

(03:46):
Moza Aquaculture Research Park in Sarasota,where they were provided with temperature controlled natural
seawater with chemical and mechanical filtration toI mean basically provide the conditions necessary for
corals exit you or out of theocean. Now, at this point,

(04:08):
you've been introducing the coral, reintroducingthe coral to the nurseries since late October.
But that's an ongoing process and thereare steps that you have to take
to make sure that they are readyto go back in and to stay.
So tell us about that process ifyou would. Oh, absolutely so.
Just just like any other organism thatwe are, we are taking from a

(04:30):
land based culture facility and putting intonatural seawater. We have to be very
careful to do that responsibly and safelyso that we're not introducing anything that may
have been that that may we maynot want to be releasing into the natural
environment. So the first step isthat we have a veterinarian that works with
us on coral health, and asyou know, among other things, had

(04:56):
he had to come to the differentfacilities, all of our facilities in person
and basically certify all of our coralsas either ready for release or not,
and those corals that are certified ashealthy to go back out are then given
a thirty day window to do that. The second step of the process is

(05:18):
that we are our regulatory partners atNoah's Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and at
Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission arerequired to authorize every single batch of coral
that goes out, and that's anecessary step to make sure that the regulatory

(05:39):
agencies are absolutely in the loop oneverything that goes out, when it goes
out, what you know, towhat nursery it went out, and so
on. And then once we getthem out into the offshore nursery, they
have a thirty day wash out periodwhere we have to monitor them every week
until they make it through that thatthat initial kind of tentative period, and

(06:03):
after that they become available to restoration. They can then be outplanted under the
reef or fragmented to build stocks backup within all of those different nurseries,
or moved around among the different nurseries. But that whole process has taken well
is taking necessarily you know, along a long time, and we,

(06:25):
just like every other restoration practitioner inthe in the region are taking a precautionary
approach and doing that in a slow, measured and strategic manner. So to
date, we've we've put back amoat. Marine Lab has put back about
seven thousand or well just shy ofseven thousand coral colonies that were that were

(06:46):
evacuated this summer, and then we'vegot several thousand left on land that are
that are in different stages of thatprocess of getting back out into the water.
Now, obviously climate is a concernand there is concern about climate change.
Is this something you're expecting to doon an ongoing basis? Are you
prepared to have to move coral fromsea based to land based facilities maybe as

(07:14):
often as every year. We're we'redefinitely now prepared to do that. However,
we are we are actively working.I mean, resilience is that core
component of most science based restoration strategy, and the idea is that we do
not do any more of these evacuationsbecause if those corals can't survive in the
conditions out on the reef, we'renot really building corel you know, restored

(07:39):
communities that are resilient to those stresses, and this won't be the last the
last Hey wave. There's been there'sbeen speculation that this summer was just the
warm up for next summer, andand if that is the case, we're
we're prepared for it. We sawall the hallmarks of resilience in the natural
and restored and restoration popular relations ornursery populations excuse me, this year.

(08:05):
And we're absolutely not looking forward toanother summer like this summer, but we
are absolutely prepared to meet that challenge. Now, speaking of resiliency, I
noticed that you mentioned that not allof the coral was removed during this evacuation,
and some of it was left behindto observe how it responded to these

(08:28):
unusual and unprecedented conditions. What haveyou been able to learn from the corals
that were left behind, Yes,we did. We left representatives of a
number of different genotypes from multiple differentspecies, excuse me, in those offshore
nurseries to see literally to use thisthermal event as a natural experiment. And

(08:52):
what we saw is basically the resultsof that natural experiment are very congruent with
the lab ratory results that we've beengetting for the last thirty years. And
that means that basically, the summaryof that is that multiple genotypes within multiple
different species do absolutely show resilience andresistance to thermal stress in particular, but

(09:20):
also these these other synergistic effects thatwe're going on during this event, So
high salinity, low dissolved oxygen content, high dissolved organic carbon, and other
dissolved organics in the water. Allof those things we definitely saw genotypic level
responses across multiple different species. Sowhat that tells us is that the traits

(09:43):
that convey resilience to these different stressesdo exist in the natural populations of multiple
different species of coral and Florida's corelreef. And more more pointedly, some
of the sexual recruits the corals thatwere bred from parents that we know the
resilience traits of did not even bleachin some of our nurture nurseries, which

(10:07):
which is particularly encouraging and that wecan not only say that there is resilience
in these populations, but that itis manipulable. So by choosing parents and
selectively breeding parent columns that have thesedifferent hallmarks of resilience, you produce offspring

(10:28):
that do incorporate multiple traits into thatnext generation. And the idea is that
these would then become the parents ofthe following generation and you build that adaptive
potential into the community over time.And clearly the work of restoring the coral
population is something that's going to belasting for a long time. Absolutely,

(10:50):
absolutely, this is it's an uphillbattle. I mean, restoration is a
moving target, right, so thethe definition of restored is definitely an evolving,
an evolving paradigm. Much you knows, as the climate changes, the
finish line moves. So this issomething that's going to likely be decades if

(11:16):
not more in the process. DoctorJason Spediro, the manager of Marine Labs
Coral reef Restoration Research program working withnurseries in the Florida Keys, Thank you
very much for joining us on Beyondthe News. Thank you very much