Photo: Key Largo, Fl. Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.
Since the late 1970s, the coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys and the Caribbean have experienced unprecedented declines, with massive losses in the population of local staghorn and elkhorn reef-building corals. In recent decades, an estimated 25 to 40 percent of the world’s corals have died due to rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, and coral bleaching—all symptoms of climate change. Fortunately, Dr. David Vaughan is leading the Coral Reef Restoration project to bring these vital biospheres back to life, just as the reefs had reached an all-time low.
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The Executive Director at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr. David Vaughan is the manager of the Coral Reef Restoration program. In 2013, he developed “microfragmenting,” a technique that allows him to create coral colonies that grow at 25 to 50 times fast than in the wild. This quick-growth process has enabled the team to develop culture or propagation for more than 20 species of reef-building hard corals that can then be transplanted to dead or dying reefs in the Keys.
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