SARASOTA, Fla. — Mote Marine Laboratory received a nearly $7 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to restore coral reefs in the Florida Keys.
The project will focus on coral reef restoration at 10 reef sites along Florida's Coral Reef Tract just offshore of the Florida Keys Archipelago.
Dr. Jason Spadaro, a staff scientist and program manager with the Coral Reef Restoration Research Program at Mote Marine Laboratory, said the grant is a substantial amount of funding, but more money will be needed.
"It's a good start. It's fantastic support toward doing restoration," said Dr. Spadaro.
Mote Marine has restored nearly 200,000 corals, and scientists hope to double that using the grant money.
"We've produced and outplanted just over 200,000 corals to date, and with the new funding, we'll be more than doubling that over the next four years with 242,000 additional fragments," said Dr. Spadaro.
Mote Marine has two different types of nurseries, an underwater nursery and another nursery onshore.
Dr. Spadaro described the underwater nursery.
"It's breaking the corals into small pieces, letting those pieces grow out and into a new colony, and then iterating that process until you have hundreds of thousands of coral fragments," said Dr. Spadaro.
Dr. Spadaro said they will also introduce 34,000 Caribbean King Crab into the areas to help with coral restoration.
"They're the largest crab in the western Atlantic so males can get up to six pounds, really big animals, but they're vegetarians. They eat algae. They remove algae very efficiently that leads to improve coral growth and survival," said Dr. Spadaro.
Florida's Coral Reef Tract generates millions of dollars in tourism and recreation. Reefs serve as a habitat for fish and protect our shoreline from hurricanes. Pollution and disease threaten the fragile ecosystem.
“Coral reef restoration is still essentially in its infancy, but we believe that this project and the ambitious objectives we have set, represent a science-based and scalable pathway to transformative and, more importantly, lasting landscape scale functional restoration of the most biodiverse and socio-economically valuable habitat and natural resource in Florida,” Dr. Spadaro said.
