Cargo Business Techwire

Friday, June 13, 2014

Miami scientists scramble to save corals before dredging of ship channel

A group of scientists in Florida are on an urgent mission to save as many corals as possible before the creatures are wiped out during the excavation of Miami's shipping channel.

The channel, scheduled for a dredging project that begins Saturday, hosts coral reefs that are protected throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean. Usually these corals are untouchable even by scientists, but in Biscayne Bay, Colin Foord and a small team of marine researchers are racing the clock to transfer them to a new home.

"They're calling these ‘corals of opportunity’ — essentially, corals that are living in a place that is slated to be destroyed for a government infrastructure project," Foord says. "They basically allowed us to go in at the last minute and rescue all of the smaller corals that were left behind."

Coral Morphologic, Foord's company, researches Florida's coral reefs and documents them through film and multimedia. Working under a state permit, he and other divers are transplanting the coral on an artificial reef a few miles away from their native habitat.

"We're finding brain coral. We're finding boulder corals, the mountainous star coral. We're finding about four or five species of corals that just this past year were proposed to be listed on the endangered species list. And they're all growing out there," he says.

For more of the NPR story: www.npr.org