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.
While 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 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 doctoral graduate who joined the expedition.
Wen has dived 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.”
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 researchers from The Florida Aquarium 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.
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