Coral Bleaching

After the historic 2023 bleaching event, the state paid to increase the lab's coral rescue capacity for when the ocean gets too hot again.

Researchers are producing new corals using the genes of those more resilient to heat, they've established two gene banks and they are doing cooling experiments, like canopies that float on the water.

Researchers are moving some corals to deeper, cooler depths, while more sensitive ones go to a temperature-controlled lab. Others will have to tough out the heat.

The Florida Aquarium is releasing 9,000 juvenile corals that were born and grown at its Apollo Beach facility, and transferring them to larger grow houses before they're planted back on the state's coral reef.

Experts say climate change is the No. 1 threat to Florida's coral reefs right now, as they also battle stony coral tissue loss disease.

Pillar corals were supposed to become "endangered" on Tuesday, but that was before a recent freeze pushed it back to March.

Left to nature, coral’s mating prospects are somewhat restricted by their inability to walk, fly or swipe Tinder to find a mate.

"By freezing these larvae, they can be held for literally hundreds of years," said Keri O'Neil with the Florida Aquarium.

North America’s only barrier reef is withering from heat and disease. Can efforts to preserve and propagate the corals at land-based facilities save them?

NOAA awarded South Florida scientists up to $16 million to try to breed and replant about 100,000 coral on ailing reefs using survivors of last summer's heat wave. Researchers say climate change is the biggest threat to coral’s survival because it’s simply making water too hot too fast.

Scientists say temperatures that have gone "crazy haywire" hot, especially in the Atlantic, are close to making the current global coral bleaching event the worst in history. It's so bad that scientists are hoping for a few hurricanes to cool things off.

With rising water temperatures threatening Florida’s coral reefs, scientists have worked to relocate the animals in order to save them. But one rescue operation run in part by Disney and Sea World in Orlando has been doing this for years - even before the latest bout of extreme heat.