UM develops artificial reef as coral restoration efforts put on hold

Florida’s governor came to the Florida Keys on Wednesday to announce a new initiative aimed at restoring the state’s battered coral reefs. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis also said the state would invest $5 million in deep-water artificial reefs, designed to help the fishing industry. At the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, scientists are developing an artificial reef system designed to mimic a natural reef, to protect the shoreline against rising seas and powerful storms. 

It's made up of concrete blocks, which look a little like heavy chunks of Swiss cheese. They deployed a test section in the waters off Miami Beach a year and a half ago. Now, it has naturally growing corals all over it, along with corals planted by the researchers. It’s performing just as its designers hoped it would when they dropped it in a challenging area with strong currents. 

“But so far, we’ve had good success, the structures remain in place, we have planted over a thousand corals on these structures," said UM’s Dr. Diego Lirman, who leads the artificial reef project. "We’ve had good survivorship even in the face of bleaching, so we’re hopeful that with the data we’re collecting, we’ll be able to expand to meaningful ecological scales so that we can start protecting segments of our shoreline."

It's sponsored by the United States Department of Defense, a sign that the Pentagon is concerned about mitigating the impacts of climate change on its coastal assets. 

“But if you think about it, it makes sense, it’s all about security, national security, coastal security,” Lirman said. 

“We’re facing increasing risks on our coastline, that’s because of enhanced coastal development but also loss of our coastal habitats," said Dr. Mike Beck, the director of the Center for Coastal Resilience at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Those habitats are our first line of coastal defense, coral reefs, mangroves and other wetlands, and without those reefs the cost of storms could double, so what we’re trying to do is restore those reefs, enhance those protections and reduce our risks overall."

There’s a team effort of researchers from many universities, government agencies and non-profit groups trying to restore the Florida Keys reefs devastated by last summer’s intense heat wave. That has been a frustrating process. 

“It was a major setback, the strongest bleaching event we’ve had on record, so we did lose a lot of corals, wild colonies and colonies that we had out-planted over the past decade, so it was a major setback," Lirman said. "We are recovering from it, we are learning from it."

Especially, Lirman said, learning from the corals that did survive the heat wave. They’re hoping to use those more resilient corals to create heartier specimens for replanting. But that process will have to wait, as they’ve halted the coral planting efforts until they see how hot the water gets this summer. 

The silver lining in last week’s heavy rain event was that it definitely cooled things off for the corals.