APOLLO BEACH, Fla. — The Florida Aquarium is once again embarking on groundbreaking work as part of its efforts to breed more resilient coral.
What You Need To Know
- The Florida Aquarium partnering with researchers internationally with the hope of creating coral babies that can tolerate warmer water temperatures
- Researchers in Tela Bay, Honduras, collected pieces of coral that have been thriving in the much warmer water. They eventually made their way here
- The aquarium is collaborating with the University of Miami on the breeding effort
It is partnering with researchers internationally with the hope of creating coral babies that can tolerate warmer water temperatures.
Seven pieces of Elkhorn coral are alive and well inside a tank at the aquarium’s Apollo Beach campus.
Keri O’Neil, coral conservation program director, could hardly contain her excitement.
“These corals were literally living in Honduras just a few weeks ago and now they are here,” O’Neil said. “They’re settled in. They’re already growing.”
It’s an international attempt to breed more heat resilient coral to plant here in Florida. It is needed after 2023’s marine heat that led to a mass bleaching event in the Florida Keys.
“Last summer’s marine heatwave was a wakeup call for sure that we really needed to put some serious collaborative effort into the Elkhorn coral population,” O’Neil said.
Researchers in Tela Bay, Honduras, collected pieces of coral that have been thriving in the much warmer water.
The corals were carefully shipped to the University of Miami, then transferred here, where O’Neil and her team will attempt to breed them with some Florida natives.
“Hopefully, some of these will be the moms, with Honduras coral dads, and we might have some Honduras coral moms with Florida coral dads, so that’s the goal,” O’Neil said.
They have had success before, collecting gametes released one a year under the right conditions.
The corals in Apollo Beach are expected to spawn by the end of the month. And if all works out, O’Neil said it will be the highlight of her career.
“I mean, I’ve been working with corals since 1999. So 25 years,” she said. “And this is something I never dreamed I’d be able to do, something that is this important to the future of a species.”
The aquarium is collaborating with the University of Miami on the breeding effort. Corals from Honduras are being housed there as well, with the expectation they will spawn and cross breed with coral from Florida.
If successful, those baby coral will eventually be planted in the Keys.