MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 South Florida corals are in crisis again. <\/p>\n
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is already sounding the alarm as ocean temperatures once again climb into the danger zone for widespread bleaching.<\/p>\n
Ian Enochs leads the coral program at the NOAA lab in Miami. <\/p>\n
Cheeca Rocks is an important climate monitoring site, famed for its historic resilience and now on the front lines of climate change.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese corals can\u2019t move,\u201d said Enochs. \u201cThey\u2019re in incredibly warm water and this is all happening right now. It\u2019s an area that we know really well, that we\u2019ve been monitoring really closely. Last week, we started to get some reports that there is some bleaching already happening now, this early on in July.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not the first time this has happened. At the end of July 2023, the hottest July ever recorded on Earth, the worst mass bleaching event in Florida history was triggered. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing 100% bleaching,\u201d said Enochs. \u201cThat\u2019s crazy. It\u2019s absolutely crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now history appears to be repeating itself. <\/p>\n
The Midwestern Regional Climate Center says South Florida has already endured 38 straight days of triple-digit heat indices, and ocean temperatures are rising again. <\/p>\n
NOAA has already raised its coral bleaching alert for parts of the Florida Reef Tract.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe start to go into higher levels of alert as the summer progresses, and what\u2019s really concerning right now is we\u2019re already hitting these alert levels this early on in July,\u201d said Enochs. <\/p>\n
Local 10 News\u2019 Louis Aguirre got into the water for a close-up look, and the devastation was immediately apparent.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s worse than I expected,\u201d said Enochs. \u201cThe tops are turning white, and if they stay like that or get worse, they could die, and that would be really bad for the ecosystem for the persistence of this overall reef.\u201d<\/p>\n
These are some of the oldest and most resilient corals on the Florida Reef Tract, which are still recovering from the summer of 2023, and now this is happening again. <\/p>\n
The outlook is alarming.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese reefs have been hammered over and over again,\u201d said Enochs. \u201cThis reef is one of the healthiest that we still have, and to see this level of stress, to see these corals responding in this way, is really disconcerting, especially this early on in the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far, it hasn\u2019t quite spread, yet. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems to be a little bit more localized to this reef,\u201d said NOAA ALML Coral Program research associate Tyler Christian. \u201cWe looked at a few other transects last week, and they weren\u2019t as bad. This one was the worst site that we surveyed, and it is worse now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group then moved on to a patch reef just five miles north that was already showing signs of heat stress.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot as bad here as Cheeca Rocks, but you saw it as well, there are definitely signs of paling and bleaching here as well,\u201d said Enochs. <\/p>\n
Over the last 40 years, Florida\u2019s Reef Tract has lost more than 90% of its healthy coral cover due to disease, pollution and repeated bleaching, driven by climate change.<\/p>\n
Enochs fears we could be in for another repeat of 2023, if not worse.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe amount of stress that the corals are experiencing at Cheeca Rocks is already higher than it was in 2023,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The hope is that by catching this bleaching early, scientists can identify which reefs are most at risk and, in some cases, step in before that damage becomes irreversible.<\/p>\n
Phanor Montoya is the restoration program manager for the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), the world\u2019s largest coral restoration organization, growing and outplanting corals to help rebuild Florida\u2019s reefs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know (if it will be similar to 2023), but we are preparing for it,\u201d said Montoya. \u201cWe\u2019ve proven that restoration saves species. If it wasn\u2019t because of restoration by CRF and others in Florida, we had already lost the staghorn and the elkhorn corals from Florida. Right now we have more corals in our nursery than we have on the reef.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the marine heat wave hit in 2023, CRF launched an emergency rescue, moving thousands of vulnerable corals from offshore nurseries into land-based facilities until conditions improved. But in some cases, it was too late; many of the already stressed-out corals would not survive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started the summer with about 45,000 corals across all our nurseries,\u201d said Montoya. \u201cBy October, we had lost 52% of our stock. Fifty-two percent was gone due to the summer. We ended up with 17,000 corals, 17,000 survivors across all our nurseries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Montoya doesn\u2019t know what the rest of the summer will bring, but improvements have been made to infrastructure and response protocol should another marine heat wave hit. <\/p>\n
Right now, none of CRF\u2019s nurseries are showing any signs of bleaching, but regulatory permits have been requested to move vulnerable corals should conditions worsen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have already asked permission from the regulators to move about 3,500 corals from our different nurseries to Elbow nurseries, seeking better conditions there,\u201d said Montoya. \u201cThat\u2019s happening, we\u2019re just waiting for the green light to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meantime, the University of Miami\u2019s Rosenstiel School is already mobilizing, launching a coral reconnaissance and recovery mission to collect different colonies of threatened elkhorn coral. <\/p>\n
The corals will be brought to land-based facilities, hoping to preserve their genetic diversity should the bleaching event intensify.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WPLG Local10.com – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 South Florida corals are in crisis again. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-349424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}