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 Dr. Ian Enochs (NOAA-AOML) and 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 (with respect to seawater quality) are doing so well. Read more about the history of the project here. We have taken 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 and hope to have some findings in late 2020. In the mean time, here are some images of these strange habits.

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 and 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.).