Port of Miami (photo credit: Colin Foord)

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) has ravage corals throughout South Florida, particularly brain corals. It took us half a day of diving offshore of Miami (Emerald Reef) to find 5-6 disease-free colonies to use as “controls” in experiments! Curiously, the brain corals in the Port of Miami are doing great: huge, disease-free, and unbleached. This led Colin Foord (Coral Morphologic) to initiate a project known as “Urban Corals,” with the goal of attempting to understand why these corals living in some of the most marginalized conditions I have ever seen are doing so well. Read more about the history of the project here. We took some samples from 5-10 Pseudodiploria strigosa (brain coral) colonies from three “urban” sites, as well as Emerald Reef, for molecular (genetic+ transcriptomic+proteomic) analyses, with the results found here.

Here are some miscellaneous shots across the three “urban” sites: Star Island, MacArthur Causeway (north side), and MacArthur Causeway (south side).

MacArthur-South (literally along the rip-rap of MacArthur Causeway, the main link between downtown Miami & South Beach).

Miscellaneous brain coral shots from the Urban Corals sites (I didn’t take many proper “habitat” shots of Star Island and MacArthur-north due to time constraints and camera battery issues.).