Scientists seek to save Florida's dying reefs with hardy nursery-grown coral
A taskforce of experts looking into the mass bleaching and decline of Florida's delicate coral reefs is planting more than 1,000 nursery-grown juveniles from the reef-building elkhorn species in a new effort to reverse the tide of destruction.
Record ocean heat in 2023 hastened the death spiral for reefs in the Florida Keys, which have lost 90% of their healthy coral cover over the last 40 years, largely because of the climate emergency, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Marine biologists from the Keys Marine Laboratory of the University of South Florida (USF) partnered with scientists from Tampa's Florida Aquarium to develop a large-scale restoration project involving elkhorn coral, which is critically endangered but also one of the fastest-growing and most resilient species.
Earlier this month, the USF facility in Long Key, halfway along the ecologically fragile Florida Keys island chain, took delivery of 1,050 young elkhorn corals spawned between 2022 and 2023 at the aquarium's conservation and research center in Apollo Beach.
The corals are acclimatizing in temperature-regulated seawater beds in Long Key. They will be distributed to research partners including the Coral Restoration Foundation, the Mote Marine Laboratory, Reef Renewal USA, and Sustainable Oceans and Reefs for planting at seven designated offshore sites around the Keys during the next two months.
Teams will monitor their progress over the following months and years. While project managers say not all will survive, they hope some of the juveniles will thrive and grow, and the knowledge gleaned will help better inform future recovery efforts.
'Maybe there will only be 100 out there a year from now, but even if it's only one out of a hundred that survives that's particularly tough, we can propagate that one,' said Cindy Lewis, director of the Keys Marine Laboratory.
'We hope there will be some resistant babies in that batch. What I do know is that if we do nothing, we'll have done nothing, and nothing will happen.'
Noaa says elkhorn branches can grow up to almost 4in (10cm) a year, and the species is particularly resilient to high wave action. They grow on larger, foundation coral species such as boulder star coral and brain coral to provide what Lewis calls a 'jungle gym' for fish and other marine life.
Their planting along the Keys will also represent the closing of a circle, because the parent corals from which they were spawned were 'rescued' from the ocean ahead of the 2023 mass bleaching event.
Biologists at the Florida Aquarium served as de facto matchmakers for the elkhorn corals, which were spawned to be as genetically diverse as possible.
'The coral juveniles we just transferred are made up of many new mother and father combinations that we hope will be more resilient to future stressors,' Keri O'Neil, director of the aquarium's coral conservation program, said.
Sign up to Down to Earth
The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential
after newsletter promotion
'Without human intervention, these parent corals would not be able to breed due to the extent of the loss. They're a sign that, even during a crisis, we can make a difference. By working together we're protecting a reef that's essential to our environment, our economy and the thousands of species that call it home.'
Lewis said the elkhorn project was a small component of a vast wider effort by numerous universities, environmental groups, and state and federal partners to try to restore as much lost coral as possible.
'Elkhorn is just one species of coral. Our partners are doing this for staghorn coral and others – the brain corals, star corals and boulder corals, the massive corals that build the mountains of reefs that these elkhorn and staghorn live on,' she said.
'All these different organizations produced over 25,000 pieces of coral this winter to put out on the reef that are going to make a difference, along with our elkhorn.
'Even though it seems dismal and depressing, the ray of hope is that we can produce these corals, we can get these corals out there, and that everybody has banded together to work together. No one organization is going to do it all. We need everybody, and we need everybody's ideas.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
35 minutes ago
- The Independent
Eating more of these plant-based foods could lower your risk of heart disease and diabetes
Eating more nuts, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains may help to reduce your risk of contracting deadly heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Researchers said this week that people who consumed more phytosterols — a natural compound found in plant foods — significantly delayed both of the conditions. Furthermore, eating more of them was linked to reduced inflammation, markers of better insulin regulation, and differences in the gut microbiome that may contribute to healthy metabolism. The study was not designed to confirm why this is the case, but the researchers said their findings strengthen the evidence. More than 7000,000 Americans die from heart disease and some 101,000 die from diabetes. 'Our findings support the dietary recommendation of adhering to healthy plant-based dietary patterns that are rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts and whole grains,' Dr. Fenglei Wang, a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement. 'These findings can help people make informed dietary choices.' Wang presented the observational findings on Tuesday at the flagship annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition. Some phytosterol-rich foods include corn, almonds, broccoli, bananas, and wheat bread. Previous research had found that eating foods with phytosterols can help to improve peoples' health by lowering bad cholesterol, and may reduce the risk of cancer. However, most clinical trials have used high doses of the phytosterols that were beyond what someone might get through just their own diet. The new research is the first to show the benefits as part of a normal diet. To reach these conclusions, Wang and his colleagues looked at data from more than 200,000 American adults that were a part of three studies. All of the participants were nurses or other health professionals and nearly 80 percent were women. Over the course of 36 years, more than 20,000 of them developed type 2 diabetes and nearly 16,000 developed heart disease. The participants' answers to food-frequency questionnaires allowed the researchers to estimate their individual intake of phytosterols, as well as three individual phytosterols known as β-sitosterol, campesterol and stigmasterol. Those who ate the most consumed the most phytosterol had about four to five servings of vegetables, two to three servings of fruits, two servings of whole grains, and half a serving of nuts each day. This made them 9 percent less likely to develop heart disease and 8 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes compares to those in the bottom fifth percentage for phytosterol intake, the research showed. Looking at the individual phytosterols, similar associations were observed for β-sitosterol. But, the same was not true for campesterol or stigmasterol. In addition, the researchers analyzed blood samples, looking at the products of metabolism — also known as metabolites — from more than 11,000 people and other metabolic biomarkers in blood samples from over 40,000 participants. They found that phytosterol and β-sitosterol levels were tied to favorable metabolites and metabolic markers relevant to heart disease and diabetes. That signaled a possible reason for the association. 'Our clinical biomarker and metabolomic results suggest the involvement of insulin activity, inflammation and the metabolism of metabolites associated with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease,' said Wang. 'This suggests that phytosterol might reduce risk by alleviating insulin resistance and inflammation.' In a group of just 465 participants, they examined the gut microbiome, or the trillions of microscopic organisms inside the intestines. They found several microbial species and related enzymes linked to higher intake of phytosterols that may affect the production of metabolites associated with a lower risk of diseases. 'We found that the gut microbiome might play a role in the beneficial associations. Some species, such as Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, carry enzymes that could help degrade phytosterol, potentially influencing host metabolism,' Wang said.
Medical News Today
an hour ago
- Medical News Today
Alzheimer's: Common insomnia treatment may prevent brain damage
Common insomnia treatment may prevent Alzheimer's-related brain damage, an animal study suggests. Image credit: ljubaphoto/Getty Images. As many as 70 million people around the world live with a sleep disorder. Sleep disorders can impact a person's risk for several health conditions, including dementia and Alzheimer's disease. A new study has found that a medication commonly used to treat insomnia may not only improve sleep quality, but also protect the brain from a buildup of the protein tau, via a mouse model. 'Poor sleep quality and sleep disorders often appear years before other symptoms of dementia due to Alzheimer's disease and related disorders become apparent,' David M. Holtzman, MD, the Barbara Burton and Reuben M. Morriss III Distinguished Professor of Neurology and scientific director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders at the Washington University School of Medicine told Medical News Today . He is the senior author of a new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience , which has found, via a mouse model, that a medication commonly used to treat insomnia may not only improve sleep quality, but also protect the brain from a buildup of the protein tau. For this study, researchers focused on a sleep disorder medication called lemborexant, sold under the brand name Dayvigo. 'Lemborexant belongs to a class of sleep medications called dual orexin receptor antagonists,' Samira Parhizkar, PhD, instructor at Washington University School of Medicine, and first author of this study, explained to MNT . 'These drugs work by blocking orexin — a protein in the brain that keeps us awake and alert.' 'By blocking the orexin signaling, the medication allows sleep to occur quickly and more easily,' Parhizkar continued. 'In other words, if your brain is like a light switch that keeps flicking on when you are trying to sleep, lemborexant helps turn that switch off, so your brain and body gets the rest it needs.' Scientists used lemborexant to treat a model of mice that were genetically prone to having tau buildup in the brain. 'In the healthy brain, tau protein acts as a 'track' that helps support the shape of cells and helps move nutrients and signals where they need to go,' Holtzman detailed. 'In Alzheimer's and a group of neurodegenerative disorders primarily affected by abnormal tau called tauopathies, abnormal tau loses its shape, integrity and therefore cellular functionality leading to tau tangles. The progressive build of these tau tangles leads to nerve cell death that contributes to memory loss, confusion among other cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease,' he explained. At the study's conclusion, researchers found treating the mice with lemborexant helped to prevent the buildup of tau in the brain, reducing the inflammatory brain damage that tau buildup is known to cause in Alzheimer's disease. 'The detrimental increase of abnormal tau is closely associated with heightened inflammatory damage in the brain,' Parhizkar said. 'Research from our lab and others has demonstrated that inflammation in the brain is a significant factor contributing to the brain damage seen in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.' 'Consequently, by decreasing both the abnormal buildup of tau and inflammatory damage, lemborexant may be highly effective in safeguarding the brain from these sources of injury,' she added. Additionally, scientists discovered that mice treated with the sleep aid had a 30–40% larger hippocampus volume compared to those not treated with the medication. 'The larger hippocampal volume indicates reduced brain damage and cellular loss in mice treated with lemborexant compared to those given vehicle control,' Holtzman said. 'In the latter group, abnormal tau protein continued to accumulate in the brain, resulting in cell damage, death, and therefore shrinkage of the hippocampus typically observed with neurodegeneration.' MNT also had the opportunity to speak with Gary Small, MD, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, about this study. Small, who was not involved in the current research, commented that the findings from this new study are consistent with previous research linking restful sleep with better cognitive health. 'For example, my research team found that sleep quality is related to both objective measures of sustained attention and self-awareness of memory decline, suggesting that interventions for improving sleep quality may contribute not only to improving the ability to focus on a particular task but also in reducing memory complaints,' he told us. 'Other work has shown that restful sleep reduces brain amyloid and inflammation, which may explain why sleep benefits cognition. The Washington University team now sheds additional light on an underlying link between insomnia and cognitive impairment: accumulation of tau protein, particularly in brain regions controlling memory,' Small added. 'Nearly 40% of people in the U.S. complain of insomnia, which can lead to daytime fatigue, memory issues, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, depression, irritability, and disrupted work and social activities. Available medicines may lead to dependency and pose such side effects as daytime drowsiness, dizziness, headache, unusual dreams, and memory problems. Finding innovative treatments that reduce tau accumulation in the brain and promote restful sleep would have the dual effect of combating Alzheimer's disease and chronic insomnia' Still, Small cautioned that, while '[t]his study is encouraging […] findings in an animal model must move forward to clinical trials of human volunteers to determine the safety and effectiveness of this potential treatment.' Alzheimer's / Dementia Sleep / Sleep Disorders / Insomnia Drugs
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Nvidia chips make gains in training largest AI systems, new data shows
SAN FRANCISCO, June 4 (Reuters) - Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab newest chips have made gains in training large artificial intelligence systems, new data released on Wednesday showed, with the number of chips required to train large language models dropping dramatically. MLCommons, a nonprofit group that publishes benchmark performance results for AI systems, released new data about chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab, among others, for training, in which AI systems are fed large amounts of data to learn from. While much of the stock market's attention has shifted to a larger market for AI inference, in which AI systems handle questions from users, the number of chips needed to train the systems is still a key competitive concern. China's DeepSeek claims to create a competitive chatbot using far fewer chips than U.S. rivals. The results were the first that MLCommons has released about how chips fared at training AI systems such as Llama 3.1 405B, an open-source AI model released by Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab that has a large enough number of what are known as "parameters" to give an indication of how the chips would perform at some of the most complex training tasks in the world, which can involve trillions of parameters. Nvidia and its partners were the only entrants that submitted data about training that large model, and the data showed that Nvidia's new Blackwell chips are, on a per-chip basis, more than twice as fast as the previous generation of Hopper chips. In the fastest results for Nvidia's new chips, 2,496 Blackwell chips completed the training test in 27 minutes. It took more than three times that many of Nvidia's previous generation of chips to get a faster time, according to the data. In a press conference, Chetan Kapoor, chief product officer for CoreWeave, which collaborated with Nvidia to produce some of the results, said there has been a trend in the AI industry toward stringing together smaller groups of chips into subsystems for separate AI training tasks, rather than creating homogenous groups of 100,000 chips or more. "Using a methodology like that, they're able to continue to accelerate or reduce the time to train some of these crazy, multi-trillion parameter model sizes," Kapoor said.
