Abstract Summary
The Florida Reef Tract (FRT) spans approximately 595 km along the south and southeast Florida (SE FL) coastline from the Dry Tortugas to Martin County. These reefs continue to experience a devastating coral disease event that began in 2014 and altered the population demographics, effectively eliminating several species from certain locales. Southeast Florida reefs were hit first by the outbreak and have been classified as a coral disease endemic zone. In addition, Hurricane Irma caused substantial damage to SE FL reefs and further exacerbated impacts and changes in the coral population brought on by the disease. This talk presents the latest state of the SE FL coral population, and introduces intervention objectives and tools and methodologies, and evaluates the success of real-world in situ applications. Coral disease prevalence remained high after Hurricane Irma at 5.2% in the transects and 11.4% in the roving diver surveys with 15 diseased species surveyed from 62 sites. Irma impact prevalence ranged from 5.8% in the transects to 11.6% in the roving diver surveys. Most impacts were from sediment burial (49%) and dislodging (34%). Disease intervention was prioritized on the largest reef-building corals (> 2m diameter) in the region, predominantly Orbicella faveolata. Intervention entailed covering diseased tissue margins with chlorinated epoxy and creating trenches in the skeleton between diseased and healthy tissue and filling them with chlorinated epoxy. Treatments exhibited a 46.8% success rate at stopping the disease at the margin and a 58.6% success rate at stopping the disease from crossing the trench. Methods were most effective on O. faveolata (62%) and less effective on the limited number of treated M. cavernosa (52.2%) colonies. The number of new treatments on monitored corals spiked in June, were very low in July, increased in August and September, and were low in October. Treatment timing relates to rainy season and warmer temperature onset in May and the warmest periods in late summer. Ongoing work entails monthly monitoring and treatment on priority corals, field-testing antibiotic effectiveness, and collecting gametes to rear and grow into coral recruits in a lab setting.
