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Florida races to rescue coral bleached by record ocean heat (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 year ago by DM_Me_Boobs@lemm.ee to c/news@beehaw.org

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[–] StringTheory@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Earlier this month, the Coral Restoration Foundation visited the Sombrero reef in the Florida Keys, a restoration site that the foundation has been working at for over a decade. “What we found was unimaginable – 100% coral mortality,” Phanor Montoya-Maya, CRF’s restoration program manager, said in a statement.

The reef they’ve been nurturing for 10 years died. 90% of the state’s corals have died. They are rescuing hunks of coral to keep in cooled aquaria on land in an attempt to preserve genetic diversity for the future.

Why? The corals can’t be transplanted back into the ocean until the average temperatures drop down, which isn’t going to happen before Florida’s coastline is severely eroded because there are no corals now to protect it. The “new” coastline won’t be proper coral habitat, even if the water does cool back down to 1970s temperatures.

Maybe they can use their tanks of coral to seed the coastlines of states further north, which will be warm enough in a few years, if not already, and will need the reefs for protection from increased storms. But I don’t see it being feasible in Florida.