In the Florida Keys, record ocean temps spark scramble to save dying corals

THE FLORIDA KEYS — Cynthia Lewis carefully pulled back the lid covering a 240-gallon tank.

As the bubbles subsided, there they were: her life’s work, the very animals she has studied for more than two decades, dying in front of her eyes.

Corals, hundreds of them, lined the scores of saltwater tanks in the outdoor lab Lewis oversees. All showed signs of serious trouble — paled patches or bleached entirely white — and some were likely already dead.

Just days and even hours before, many of these corals were in the open ocean, where temperatures surged this week into the triple digits for the first time in recorded history. A buoy stationed in the waters around Manatee Bay, to the north of Key Largo, recorded an ocean temperature of 101.1 degrees at 6 p.m. Monday. If verified, that could be the hottest sea surface temperature ever recorded on Earth.

Now, scientists are scrambling to evacuate corals from their suddenly unlivable waters. More than 1,500 corals and counting have already been harvested from offshore nurseries over the past week and delivered to their new refuge in the temperature-controlled tanks at the Keys Marine Laboratory on Long Key.

The corals will likely shelter here — in what Lewis describes as a

“coral halfway house”

— for months until the ocean heat subsides. This time of the year, water temperatures should be in the mid-80s, not pushing mid-90s or higher.

“It’s happening so much earlier than we’ve ever seen it,” said Lewis, the lab’s director. She paused in the 95-degree heat to catch her breath.

“It’s an unprecedented event: We’ve never seen it this hot, for this long, this early.”

In a last-ditch effort to curb mass bleaching and death, scientists from across the state who monitor offshore nurseries are using the lab as refuge. The Tampa-based Florida Aquarium, the state’s wildlife commission and the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg are using the coral refuge, which as of Monday afternoon was sitting at 50% capacity with more coral scheduled to arrive in the evening.

Lewis worries for her staff. Like her, they are losing animals they dearly love. And fast.

For many working to round up corals, there’s no time to grieve, Lewis says. That part will come later, as it inevitably does in this line of work, marred by disease, human-caused water quality problems and the looming threats of climate change.

But for now, she says, there is only time to act. When you’re dealing with super-heated corals in an unprecedented marine heat wave, every minute counts.

“There’s an emotional toll that nobody can understand unless you’ve been in the trenches and done it yourself,” Lewis said. “They’re under a lot of emotional stress. But for now, they’re running on adrenaline. They’ve got to get it done.”

“We need to protect what we can”

Last week, the federally operated Coral Reef Watch placed the Florida Keys under a bleaching Alert Level 2, the highest alert level on the scale.

That means there’s a likelihood of more than 90% of all the reefs and corals in the Florida Keys bleaching at some point this summer, according to Bill Precht, a Miamibased coral scientist with more than four decades of research experience.

Acting quickly to soften the crisis, the Coral Restoration Consortium, a community of global experts, sent out guidance this week with advice for how scientists in

Florida should respond: Immediately cease restoration activities, the consortium urged, and move offshore corals to land facilities. Monitor the health of rescued corals daily. Document the losses. Take pictures. And do your best.

“We are a community, we will get through this El Niño and likely mass bleaching together as we have in the past, by exchanging stories, helping each other, and improving the way we do restoration,” the consortium wrote in its guidance, reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times.

“In this moment, we need to protect what we can, identify resilient corals, and experiment with techniques to help us in the future.”

It’s not the first time Florida has seen the damage wrought by a bleaching event.

In 2014, a third of all the elkhorn corals monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Upper Keys were either damaged or killed in a mass bleaching event.

The summer and winter of 2014 were, at the time, the warmest on record for those waters.

But this year is running hotter.