Thousands of corals — livestream stars — may be moved to make room for a ship’s berth
PortMiami could move Coral City Camera, a livestream of a lively reef at the Port, to accommodate a new cruise berth for Disney. It’s also moving 4,600 corals to an artificial reef.
The day the divers appeared on-screen — alien lifeforms in a world otherwise populated with corals, sponges and a particular
ly feisty parrotfish — Colin Foord knew something was wrong.
Regular viewers of the Coral City Camera, a livestream of a flourishing coral reef on the northeast tip of PortMiami’s Dodge Island, were panicked when the hulking shapes of scuba divers loomed over the reef, scaring away the fish some viewers know by name. They emailed Foord, the marine biologist behind the camera, which launched in February.
PortMiami, the busiest cruise port in the world operated by Miami-Dade county, did not know that a camera attached to a 200-pound concrete block
just off its shoreline was broadcasting the underwater comings and goings 10 feet below the surface to thousands of followers.
When Foord first got the federal permit in November to place his camera, the Port’s masterplan called for a massive expansion to make room for new cruise berths at the port, but there were no plans for the little slice of riprap Coral City called home — at least through 2035.
But COVID-19, which paralyzed the cruise industry, suddenly changed things. Even with the industry’s immediate future in question, PortMiami now plans to tack on another cruise berth to its expansion — a move that would evict the Coral City Camera in the process.
The piece of underwater real estate that Coral City fans have become familiar with is part of a newly proposed cruise berth, first reported by WLRN, for Disney Cruise Line. The divers who viewers saw on their screens were there to do a coral survey, a prerequisite before construction.
Now, Foord has to move his camera to make way for new cruise ships, but that’s not the big concern. The port project will require the uprooting, removal and relocation of thousands of healthy corals to an artificial reef that Foord worries is too deep and dark to be a suitable home.
Tens of thousands of Coral City Camera fans have written to officials from Miami to Washington, D.C., begging for the camera to remain in place. They don’t want to lose sight of the fish they name and track, like Ramón, the yellowtail parrotfish, and Oval, a doctorfish missing its tail. Foord said he’s working on a children’s book about the underwater community his viewers have grown to love.
“We don’t want the end of the children’s book to be ‘then the terrible people destroyed coral city to bring in all these cruise ship passengers’,” he said.
‘IRON CLAD’ AGREEMENTS NO MORE
Before COVID-19 halted cruises in mid-March, PortMiami was experiencing unprecedented public and private investment in five new cruise terminals and two cruise company headquarters. Last year, Miami-Dade county agreed to pay $700 million toward the projects, and the cruise companies — Carnival Corporation, Royal Caribbean Group, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, MSC Cruises and Virgin Voyages — agreed to repay the county $5.8 billion over the next 20 to 62 years in rent and passenger fees.
Then the pandemic shook up the industry and the deals — referred to by PortMiami director Juan Kuryla last year as “iron clad” — were renegotiated. Miami-Dade commissioners agreed to let the port waive $285 million in cruise company fees.
The first to be redrawn was MSC Cruises’ $300 million company headquarters and cruise terminal at Berths 8 and 9, the largest project. Originally slated to begin construction in October, the company now has until February 2021 to raise the funds and May 2021 to begin construction, which can include a pier at Berth 10 for Disney Cruise Line, according to a resolution adopted by Miami-Dade commissioners in July.
That new spot is precisely where Foord’s camera, which had racked up tens of thousands of viewers and international publicity since its launch, is located. It’s also where thousands of corals live and more than 120 species have been spotted by the camera so far, including manatees and sea turtles.
In May, as the port submitted permit applications for Berth 10 and prepared its development proposal for the Miami-Dade board of commissioners, the port reached out to Foord about the camera, whose current location it saw as a regulatory and public relations hurdle to the project.
Becky Hope, in charge of environmental resiliency at the port, asked Foord via email to send her the permits for the camera, which he did. Hope forwarded the permits to DERM and asked to discuss them.
Her next email to Foord, after more than two months of silence, was in July, just after the county commission approved the Berth 10 development. Hope emailed Foord urging him to consider moving the camera.
“This authorization expires in November, and now may be a good time to explore moving the camera to the eastern tip of the island,” Hope’s email said.
In September, Foord launched a Change.org petition to urge the port to keep the corals (and the camera) where they are. So far 48,797 people have signed. Besides the fear that a location shift for the camera would mean an end to regular appearances of familiar fish, Foord said the move would disrupt science. Chinese high school students are using the camera’s live feed to develop software that would use artificially intelligence to identify fish.
And Foord argues the camera itself provides a window into the lives of some of the hardiest corals around, the kind that could be strong enough to survive climate change and help scientists figure out how to repopulate dying reefs.
“We understand this is a working port. We understand the riprap they’re living on was placed there with taxpayer money, but at the same time we realize that the coral living on these rocks are some of the most significant coral reefs in Florida if not the world,” he said.
In late October, Foord agreed to a compromise. The Port is now giving him until Jan. 15 to move to a new site 300 feet away.
But Foord is still fighting to push that deadline back further, since the new agreement with MSC gives the company until May 2021 to start construction.
“There’s no need to move the camera until development is imminent,” he said.
When asked why the camera can’t remain until construction begins, spokesperson for the port Andria Muniz-Amador said, “Continuity in one location is needed for a successful program. The new site was established now to allow overlap of monitoring data to allow comparison and continuity of data.”
The Army Corps of Engineers, one of three agencies responsible for allowing Port projects to happen, said the permit for Berth 10’s development hasn’t been approved yet because they haven’t found the right spot to put the corals. DERM is still reviewing the permit application, which it received in June.
Spokesperson for Disney Cruise Line Kim Prunty said the company is in touch with Foord about the camera.
“We are interested in expanding our presence at PortMiami and are in the early stages of exploring this potential opportunity with MSC and the Port,” she said in an email. “We appreciate Coral City Camera reaching out to us about their efforts and are talking with them and the port as part of our broader review.”
A NEW HOME FOR THOUSANDS OF CORALS
It’s not just the camera that is at risk of eviction, but thousands of corals surrounding it. And Foord is concerned that the new spot for the corals could be unsuitable.
The last time the port moved corals was in 2017 to make room for the new Royal Caribbean terminal. The lion’s share of the 151 corals were moved to the rocks and riprap on the easternmost point of the port, a spot known as the Pilot’s House. Five went to an artificial reef offshore of Miami Beach.
A 2019 checkup on the pilot’s house reef found that only 72% of the transplanted coral survived, below the 85% survival threshold set by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection. The department told the Miami Herald it was “still reviewing” the two-year checkup results.
“Should any corrective or enforcement action be required, the department will work with other regulatory agencies to determine additional measures to reach mitigation success, or even additional mitigation requirements,” DEP Press Secretary Weesam Khoury wrote in an email.
When asked how DEP would ensure future coral transplantation efforts — like those required for construction to accommodate terminals for Virgin Voyages, MSC, and possibly Disney Cruise Lines — would be more successful, Khoury did not offer specifics.
“Each project’s mitigation and monitoring requirements are tailored to the specific and potential impacts that could occur with that project,” she wrote.
The Port’s initial expansion, not counting the spot where the Coral City Camera currently resides, calls for 4,763 corals to be moved. The permit application for Disney’s potential berth estimates that there are about 2,225 coral colonies in the area. It’s unclear how many might be moved since the law only requires transplant for corals of a certain size.
No matter what, that’s a lot of corals to move. And the location — at least for the first 4,763 — is an artificial reef offshore of Miami Beach known as Port of
Miami Artificial Reef site
A.
Sara Thanner, head of DERM’s artificial reef program, said DERM spot checks most reefs annually, but it is not a thorough survey of the health of each reef.
Thanner said the 2019 spot check report of reef site A is not yet completed, but a 2018 report identified fewer than a dozen hard corals. The report notes that Hurricane Irma and reckless divers could have damaged the reef.
“For the most part, they’re doing OK. They have the same conditions that affect the natural reefs. You can see a loss of corals just like you would on the natural reefs,” she said.
A more detailed report on the health of all the county’s artificial reefs published in 2019 revealed that ivory tree coral, about half of the corals transplanted from Berth 7 to the Pilot’s House, had experienced a dramatic die-off at the PortMiami artificial reef site.
The report found that the sharp decline was not due to the coral disease running rampant in South Florida, but “could be related to the dredging, storms, and/or another cause but without pre and post-event sampling the true reason behind the decline remains unknown.”
Foord worries that the transplanted corals won’t survive in the new location. He said the artificial reef is in deeper water, “which doesn’t make any biological sense in my opinion.” He’d rather see them moved to the pilot’s house, where the corals from the Royal Caribbean project were sent.
“If you move all these corals offshore, they’re out of sight and out of mind and no one will ever pay attention to them again,” he said.