CODVIP|CODVIP slots free spins|CODVIP superslots！

Since 2018, my lab has transplanted hundreds of coral specimens to reefs in Florida to study what makes them grow. We have albums of photos documenting their livessatta9, starting from branches no bigger than your finger to beautiful treelike adults as big as beach balls.

In June 2023, as water temperatures in Florida skyrocketed, my team rushed to our field sites — and found extreme bleaching (the loss of color signaling that corals are starving) and death already underway. Throughout the Florida Keys, corals were disappearing in an ocean that had become too hot for them to survive. We left our experiment running to find out what would happen. By November, 98 percent of our corals were dead.

This severe bleaching was just the latest blow to reefs already battered by storms, disease and the loss of other animals. In the 18 years I’ve studied reefs in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, coral populations have continued to decline such that they can no longer recover naturally; I worry that even those few survivors from our project won’t last another summer in which water temperatures soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Caribbean reefs are now in such dire condition that lifelong coral biologists are considering calling them a total loss and trying to replace native coral with species imported from the Pacific Ocean. I have a different take. I believe we can still stave off the complete collapse of Caribbean reefs. But we must act quickly to bank living coral in aquariums and stockpile their eggs and sperm in cryostorage for future I.V.F. efforts. If we abandon them in an increasingly inhospitable ocean, we put them at risk of extinction.

The goal is to buy time while we wait for the world to slow, and hopefully, one day reverse climate change. Banking and freezing coral may sound extreme, but it’s necessary — many of the remaining wild corals represent unique genetic combinations. Lose too many and the rest could go extinct just by chance. If we can’t rescue them, we could face the extinction of an entire ecosystem.

Last summer, there wasn’t a roster of emergency workers to help evacuate corals, much less aquariums fully prepared to receive them. Organizations such as Mote Marine Laboratory and the Florida Aquarium swiftly mobilized what tanks and teams they could. Those teams worked themselves to the breaking point.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.satta9

• to
• satta9
• see
• Want
• Coral