Leneita Fix, executive director at The Reef Institute in West Palm Beach, with a miniature version of the Atlantic Ocean. The institute is advising Delray Beach on which coral to use to restore its reef. Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By John Pacenti
In a cramped office space in West Palm Beach’s Northwood neighborhood, in a room bathed in blue light, the ocean not only lives, it thrives.
“So everything that you see here mimics the healthiest version of the ocean that we can have,” said Leneita Fix, executive director of The Reef Institute, whose topaz eyes are literally the color of the Caribbean ocean.
“These lights follow sunrise and sunset every day and the seasons. So this coral thinks it is 12:35 on March 4th in Palm Beach County.”
The baby coral will end up offshore of Delray Beach under plans hatched by a little-known committee on reef restoration. Delray Beach Sustainability Officer Kent Edwards asked the City Commission at its March 11 meeting for $117,000 annually to fund the effort.
But this is Delray Beach, right? Nothing is so simple and the request ran straight into the teeth of Mayor Tom Carney — who insisted the amount initially requested was $40,000, not $117,000.
Carney claimed at one point that he felt it was a “bait and switch,” and that he didn’t expect a request for $117,000.
“I love reefs. Seriously. I fish the reefs all the time. So to the extent that we can improve marine life, I’m 100% for,” he told The Coastal Star.
“I clearly understand the importance. It was just something different than I expected.”
Still, the $40,000 eventually approved is enough to get started. “The hope is that this only will be the start of the funding,” Fix said. “Their fiscal year starts in [October] and so we will seek to put in the budget for that year and there will be additional fundraising, as well.”
Fix and her team planned to assess sites on April 2. “The focus is going to be on getting coral in the water,” she said.
Staghorn coral grown at The Reef Institute in West Palm Beach. Staghorn and elkhorn are often called the divas of the coral world because of their fast growth, importance in reef building, and role as a vital habitat for marine life, making them a cornerstone of Caribbean reefs.
Living creatures
A quick background on coral.
Coral is an animal and it’s not doing great due to pollution, ocean acidification, ocean temperature increases (last summer was devastating off South Florida’s coastline) and disease.
Marine biologist Sylvia Earle “has a statement. She says, ‘We don’t even know what will happen when all the coral is gone,’” Fix said.
Florida’s coral reef is 350 miles long, extending from the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico to the St. Lucie Inlet in Martin County.
Some corals have nearly gone extinct in the wild, like pillar coral; however, they live in Fix’s lab. Fix explained that certain corals in her lab are not out-planted, referring to them as a “living biobank” that will act as a baby factory to continuously produce new offspring.
The restoration effort
Enter Delray Beach’s little committee that could. Organized by Jim Chard, a former commissioner and chairman of the city’s Historic Preservation Board, the committee also includes Vice Mayor Juli Casale, Edwards, Fix and stakeholders such as the Sandoway Discovery Center.
“I am excited to be moving the reef restoration initiative forward,” Casale said. “This is truly a cutting-edge conservation effort with long-term benefits.”
Another member of the committee — Chard likes to call it a consortium — is Jason Bregman of Delray Beach’s Singer Studio, which has invented a substrate that looks to revolutionize artificial reefs.
“The artificial reef, once it’s placed and populated with life and corals, will start to help replenish the beach naturally,” Chard said. “The main thing it would do is prevent the beach from being washed away.”
Bregman wanted to place a test off Delray Beach and see if Fix’s corals would spawn and land on his substrate, but Palm Beach County ended up being too much of an impediment.
“As of right now, we’re more likely to deploy in the Caribbean than in Delray,” he said. “The county right now has the permitted sites.”
The benefits of coral
Corals provide vital ecosystem services like food security through fisheries, coastal protection from storms and erosion, and a significant source of income through tourism related to diving and snorkeling activities.
Singer Studio’s substrate hopes to save beaches — and thus millions of dollars spent to replenish them. It is full of nooks and crannies to attract coral, but the individual pieces fit together to create a spine that not only fosters coral growth but stops beach erosion, Bregman said.
Delray Beach is looking at spending $29 million to keep its world-renowned beach and dunes pristine through a renourishment project. Renourishment projects dump sand — either dredged up or trucked in — on beaches.
Some municipalities have embraced artificial reefs, such as Hollywood, which has sunken concrete mermaids and Greek gods.
“It’s going to be a tourist attraction,” Bregman said of that city’s efforts. “The thing that’s interesting about it is, they don’t even see it as coastal protection at all. They barely see it as an environmental thing. They see it as a tourism project.”
Delray Beach isn’t going to be a diver’s destination. The current is too swift. Fix is looking to save corals and hopes — prays — the city is a willing partner.
Various types of coral in the coral nursery.
A growing process
Back at The Reef Institute, the staffers know when certain types of corals spawn. They scoop up the eggs and the sperm and place them in what Fix calls the “cradle.” At this point, they are no more than mere specks, but those specks grow on little pieces of tile and eventually get to the point of being ready to be placed in the ocean.
“Up until now, it has been two years. But now we are playing around with the idea, ‘Could we put them in at a smaller size?’” she explained.
New tanks await coral inside the institute’s future home, which is much larger. The institute and Delray Beach planned to assess sites for coral starting this month.
The Reef Institute is preparing to move into a ginormous new facility in West Palm Beach — at 23,000 square feet, the size of almost half a football field. The mammoth project of moving corals will soon be underway. By the way, staghorn and elkhorn are the divas of the coral world, Fix informs, and need to be moved last. Another fun fact is that brain coral gets its coloring from the symbiotic relationship it has with algae.
Fix says the importance of a partnership with Delray Beach and The Reef Institute cannot be understated.
“Delray backing us opens the eyes of the rest of the county. They’re pioneering. They’re paving the way,” she said. “And I’ve thought that for a long time. Local cities can go, ‘OK, we get it. We’re going back to do it as a city.’ It just opens the gates.”
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