Bleached grooved brain coral, center and left, and bleached boulder brain coral on the proper. Photo taken on August 1.
NOAA, coral reefs, Florida Keys, coral reefs, coral bleaching, climate change, warm oceans
Coral reefs off the coast of Florida are being hit by a mass bleaching event on account of record high ocean temperatures, and early indications suggest a world mass bleaching event may very well be underway.
“It is a very serious event,” Derek Manzello, the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch Program, said on a conference call with reporters Thursday. And it’s especially severe within the oceans off the coast of Florida.
Everlasting damage to Florida’s reefs could have notable economic impacts on the state’s economy.
Coral reefs provide between $678.8 million and $1.3 billion value of economic profit to Florida, including $577.5 million in recreational diving and snorkeling, and $31.2 million in industrial fishing, in accordance with estimates compiled by NOAA. Reefs support fisheries and tourism and the associated hotels and restaurants in those coastal economies, said Ian Enochs, a research ecologist a NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, on a call with reporters on Thursday.
They’re also a primary line of defense for coastal communities against storm activity, Enochs said.
“Reefs are also really necessary for buffering storm energy and hurricane wave motion that may otherwise pummel our shorelines and our coastal infrastructure,” Enochs said. “They live partitions that breaks that energy from hitting hitting our shores.”
A couple of quarter of marine life associate with coral reefs in some unspecified time in the future of their lives, and if reefs get eroded and lose a few of their “structural complexity,” they lose their capability to be a house to as many marine species, Manzello said.
Most of Southeast Florida and the Florida Keys are currently under a level two alert, which suggests that bleaching and significant mortality is probably going, in accordance with NOAA’s definitions. The Sentinel climate research and monitoring site within the Florida Keys has recorded 100% coral bleaching since late July.
But coral reef scientists have identified reefs with some level of warmth stress symptoms in waters stretching from Columbia to Cuba.
“Florida is just the tip of the iceberg,” Manzello said.
It is a photo of the coral reef called Cheeca Rocks, positioned throughout the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, taken on June 30, 2023, before coral bleaching occured.
Photo courtesy NOAA
It is a photo of the coral reef called Cheeca Rocks, positioned throughout the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, taken on July 24, 2023, after coral bleaching occurred.
Photo courtesy NOAA
Record hot oceans in an El Niño 12 months
Coral reefs grow best in water temperatures between 73 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. Sea surface temperatures broke the previous record of 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit within the Florida Keys on July 9 and have exceeded that level for 28 of the last 37 days, Manzello said.
When corals suffer heat stress, they expel zooxanthellae, an algae symbiote that they should survive. This is named coral bleaching.
Coral bleaching has happened before in Florida. There have been eight mass coral bleaching events which have impacted all the Florida Keys since 1987, Manzello said. But this 12 months, the warmth stress began a full five to 6 weeks sooner than ever before, Manzello said, and it’s expected to last through late September to early October.
Corals can get better from bleaching events if conditions moderate sufficiently quickly, although they might have reduced reproduction capability and greater susceptibility to disease for some years after. But already, some parts of the coral within the Florida Keys are experiencing the gathered heat stress that’s twice what scientists expect is the quantity they’ll take, Manzello said.
Ian Enochs observing the Cheeca Rocks corals in Florida on July 31.
Photo courtesy NOAA
“We hear the word unprecedented thrown around on a regular basis, but allow me to qualify that word with the facts: Florida’s corals have never been exposed to this magnitude of warmth stress. This heat occurred sooner than ever before,” Manzello said. “An enormous concern is that temperatures are reaching their seasonal peak straight away, so this stress is more likely to persist for a minimum of the following month. These corals will experience heat stress that isn’t only higher than ever before, sooner than ever before, but for longer than ever before. This is vital since the impacts to corals is a function of how high the warmth stress is and the way long it lasts.”
These predictions could moderate if a hurricane or tropical storm comes through Florida waters because these storm events cool the ocean waters and the coral environments.
While Florida coral are suffering among the worst bleaching, scientists have confirmed coral bleaching off the coast of Columbia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Panama within the Eastern Tropical Pacific and off Belize, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands within the Atlantic.
“We’re talking about 1000’s upon 1000’s of miles of coral reefs undergoing severe bleaching heat stress,” Manzello said.
There have been three global coral bleaching events: In 1998, 2010, and a three-year period from 2014 to 2017, which occurred on the heels of a powerful El Niño weather event.
“So what’s concerning now could be that, again, we’re right on the cusp of a really strong El Niño,” Manzello said. El Nino is a weather pattern that has the potential to bring warmer temperatures and more extreme weather events. “Now, it’s still way too early to predict whether or not there can be a world bleaching event, but when we compare what is going on straight away to what happened at first of the past global bleaching event, things are worse now than they were in 2014 to 2017.”
A ‘Herculean rescue effort’
In recent weeks, scientists have been executing a major and coordinated effort to rescue corals from the oceans off the coast of Florida.
Photo courtesy NOAA
An enormous and coordinated effort is underway in Florida to guard among the corals facing existential threats. Some species have been taken to land-based tanks, and others are being relocated to deeper, cooler waters. Roughly 150 elkhorn coral and 300 staghorn coral fragments have been rescued, said Andy Bruckner, a research coordinator at NOAA’s Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, on Thursday’s call with reporters.
“This represents every remaining unique genotype or genetic strain of those species that is known to exist within the reefs in Florida,” Bruckner said. “This has been a Herculean effort for what’s been done thus far.”
The unprecedented coral bleaching conditions are hard for scientists and preservationists, but they’re leaning in, said Jennifer Koss, director of the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, on the decision with reporters on Thursday.
“Individuals are anxious, they’re depressed, but at the identical time, they’re pitching in and doing every little thing that they’ll because everyone knows, this isn’t a resource we are able to afford to lose. We cannot — full stop — afford to lose coral reefs,” Koss said. “The ecosystem and societal values that they supply to coastal communities, particularly Florida along the southeast and within the Keys, is critical to sustaining economies and the protection of the folks that live there. In order horrible because it is, we’re in it, and we’ll fight to the death to determine the best way to make sure that corals should buy enough time to face up to this event.”