A possible solution to Florida’s coral crisis just arrived in Tampa Bay

Off the northern coast of mainland Honduras, in a bay nestled between national parks, a potential fix to Florida’s widespread coral crisis lives beneath the surface.

As corals across the Caribbean succumb to spiking ocean temperatures and disease, a bustling reef tract in Tela Bay has, somehow, withstood the threats. Corals in the bay regularly endure higher-than-normal temperatures and freshwater flows, yet they continue to show impressive resilience.

Where the average coral cover across the Caribbean sits at a dismal 18%, the Coral Reef Alliance estimates the coverage in Tela Bay is 68%.

“This is a very, very special place,” said Antal Borcsok, co-founder of Tela Marine, a Honduran science organization and aquarium bordering the bay.

In 2022, Borcsok stumbled upon a research paper written by Miami marine biologist Andrew Baker about coral survival in hot water. He felt compelled to contact Baker about the corals in his own backyard that seemed to endure the heat.

That connection with Baker two years ago led to a first-of-its-kind, multinational effort that unfolded last month to bring more than a dozen coral fragments from Honduras to Florida. University of Miami scientists traveled to Tela Bay in late May to collect coral parents with the hopes scientists can learn from — and reproduce — heat-tolerant corals after a devastating marine heatwave and die-off last summer.

These 13 pieces of elkhorn coral, with sprawling brown branches resembling antlers, could be a key to more resilient reefs in Florida as human-fueled climate change threatens to destroy an ecosystem that supports more than 4,000 fish species and 70,000 jobs.

And now, seven of those corals call Tampa Bay home.

‘Not all hope is lost’

The journey to Tampa Bay began with a 4 a.m. wakeup for scientists one June morning to dive for, and carefully remove, the corals from the Tela Bay seafloor.

The Honduran reef sat a few hundred feet from shore. The water was so shallow that the team’s dive computers at times couldn’t register the depth, according to Alexandra Wen, a University of Miami marine biology doctorate graduate who joined the expedition.

Wen has dove a handful of times on shallow water reefs with elkhorn corals close to shore. To see the sheer amount of coral in one area at Tela Bay was “really astonishing,” she said.

“Corals that exist in these kinds of environments are of particular interest to us in our lab,” she said. “Their resilience can teach us a lot.”

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All told, it took Wen and other University of Miami researchers with Baker’s lab about 15 hours from the moment the specimens were removed from the water in Tela Bay to when an Amerijet cargo aircraft landed at Miami International Airport. But the journey didn’t end there.

A team of Florida Aquarium researchers then drove another four hours through the night to their lab in Hillsborough County. Bleary-eyed, biologists Rachel Morgan and Matt Wade arrived at 2 a.m. to the Florida Aquarium’s coral conservation facility in Apollo Beach on June 7. Seven coral slabs, which had been thriving in Tela Bay less than a day earlier, now sat submerged in coolers in the team’s Ford F-250 truck bed.

For several years, scientists at the Coral Conservation and Research Center, including Morgan and Wade, have successfully helped elkhorn corals to spawn by mimicking the natural ingredients needed for them to release sperm and eggs. Those efforts have been a monumental feat for coral restoration. It was an obvious choice to bring some of the Honduran corals to this facility to increase the odds of survival, researchers said.

“After last summer, and the major heat-stress event, we’re all pushing together to do any little thing we can. So when there’s a call for us to be helpful in any way, we get an adrenaline rush of excitement,” Morgan said recently. “If we don’t do something now, another hot summer could easily wipe out the rest of our corals.”

The duo offloaded corals from the truck into a 370-gallon, temperature-controlled tank where they will remain indefinitely.

On a recent afternoon, the lab’s director Keri O’Neil leaned over the tank housing the corals with a smile on her face.

Last summer, O’Neil and her team joined the unprecedented scramble to evacuate corals from superheated ocean waters off the Florida Keys. It’s been a hard stretch for coral scientists, but the new arrivals bring hope, she said.

“On a human level, these are an amazing example of international collaboration,” O’Neil said. “Corals don’t know boundaries between one country and another. If we really want to do what’s best, we need to be willing to cross international lines. And this is an amazing example of that.”

Aquarium biologists have been keeping a watchful eye on the new additions since they arrived in June. The team checks on the corals at least four times a week, and tests the water’s chemistry weekly. The tank’s temperature is monitored automatically 24 hours a day. If it dips outside of 84 degrees, O’Neil and other biologists get a notification on their phones.

Future generations of corals that can withstand hotter temperatures could begin with these seven coral fragments and the potential babies they might produce, but the success of the Honduran expedition hinges on whether the transplanted corals will spawn.

The Florida Aquarium hopes these animals reproduce sometime during the full moon in late July or August. If successful, the team will collect their eggs and create what might be the first in a new line of heat-tolerant corals. The lab started spawning elkhorn corals in 2022, and the Tampa Bay Times was there to witness coral spawning again last year.

“If we can successfully do this, and cross these corals with Florida’s corals — and get the regulatory permission to put them out at sea — I really think this could make a huge difference,” O’Neil said. “Not all hope is lost for Florida reefs.”

Solutions through ‘genetic rescue’

Florida’s elkhorn coral population has faced extensive declines, and last year’s marine heatwave proved challenging: Of the five Florida Keys reefs surveyed by federal researchers after the 2023 crisis, only three had elkhorn corals. Researchers couldn’t find any living elkhorn coral at the popular Looe Key Reef in the lower Keys.

These major losses across the state’s population are why elkhorn coral is one of only two species approved for ‘genetic rescue’, a conservation process that involves moving corals to areas to incorporate new genetics. If the practice sounds familiar, it was used on endangered Florida panthers when biologists decided to release female Texas pumas into the wild to curb panther inbreeding and bolster the population.

There are risks to genetic rescue, O’Neil said. If the Honduras corals were poorly adapted and they bred with natural corals offshore, it could cause future populations to be weaker. That’s unlikely, O’Neil said, especially considering offshore corals are having difficulty breeding on their own.

While transporting corals from Honduras to Florida was a permitting headache, a new regulatory hurdle looms on the horizon. If this new breed of corals reaches adulthood, state and federal governments must then approve planting the offspring onto offshore reefs. That process is “crucial” to continuing coral conservation efforts, according to researchers.

It could take more than a year for the new crop of baby resilient corals to be sent offshore, and those may not reproduce for several more years after that.

In the meantime, Antal Borcsok, the Honduran who first made the connection with American coral researchers, has a message to all Floridians:

“We hope that these corals help repopulate your reefs,” Borcsok said. “We want to work closely with you guys to help spread the seeds of these genetically special corals.”