UM team helps with new technique aimed to save Florida's coral reefs

Scientists from the University of Miami are participating in an effort to potentially solve Florida's coral crisis .

Why it matters: Last summer's record-breaking marine heatwave pushed coral reefs in the Florida Keys to the brink.

• Now, at The Florida Aquarium's Coral Conservation and Research Center in Tampa, elkhorn colonies are being studied to potentially save Florida's reefs from rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change.

Catch up quick: The extreme heat last summer completely wiped out one reef, and many more corals have turned white, a phenomenon known as coral bleaching.

• The troubling die-off led scientists to transfer thousands of corals to labs to keep them alive until temperatures returned to normal.

Threat level: A quarter of ocean animals depend on coral reefs for shelter. They're also a big driver of tourism in Florida.

• "Last summer, you might as well have sped up time by 50 years," research center director Keri O'Neil told Axios Tampa Bay. "It made everyone realize we probably don't have as much time as we thought we did."

The big picture: Led by Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, a team collected the elkhorn fragments from a reef in Tela Bay off the northern coast of Honduras, where the corals have somehow thrived in the same extreme heat affecting Florida's population.

• Scientists will study them to understand why the corals are so resilient.
• They hope to breed them with Florida's surviving corals — a technique called "genetic rescue" — to produce offspring able to survive warmer temperatures, Baker said in a news release.

How it works: Elkhorn coral reproduction happens after the full moon in July or August. This month's full moon comes on July 21, so scientists will begin monitoring for spawning activity the next day.

Flashback: Five years ago, the aquarium was part of a coral cross-breeding effort in which elkhorn corals from the Caribbean island of Curaçao were fertilized using coral sperm from Florida.

• The effort was successful, producing hundreds of offspring, but they couldn't be released onto Florida's reefs because of genetic differences between the populations.

What's next: The Honduran corals are more closely related to Florida corals. Scientists hope the offspring from this experiment will clear regulatory hurdles to release them into the sea.