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Coral Morphologic

@coralmorphologic / coralmorphologic.tumblr.com

Human-Coral Symbiosis ◦ Est. 2007 ◦ Miami, Florida
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Our Coral City iconographic apparel & accessory offers continue today with the first of three new design sets from DJ Ray. Shop the 'Sunrise' collection @ https://coralmorphologic.bigcartel.com/category/coral-city-camera

Support the Coral City Camera by sporting our all-new tee shirts, anoraks, waist packs, totes, and patches. All sales benefit the Coral City Foundation's efforts to research and restore Miami's aquatic ecosystems.

#coral city camera#coral morphologic#miami
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“Coral is the past, present, and future of Miami.”

The city of Miami, home to over 400,000 people, is on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Sea levels are predicted to rise anywhere from 10-17 inches by 2040, putting the city’s citizens and unique habitats at risk. At least seven of the more than 30 species of hard corals that inhabit Miami-Dade County reefs are already threatened with extinction.

Founded by Colin Foord and J.D. McKay in 2007, Coral Morphologic blends science and art in a bid to highlight the beauty of Miami’s corals while inspiring the restoration of urban reefs to protect the planet. “Projections of a Coral City” used large-scale projection-mapping to cast macroscopic images of native corals on the Miami concert hall.

“We are living in Atlantis before the flood,” Foord tells Atmos. “The highest natural elevations in Miami are the ancient coral reef ridge. The cement used in our buildings is made by grinding up their limestone fossils. By projecting videos of the corals back onto their ancestors, we portend a future of sea level rise where our concrete buildings submerge to become an artificial reef colonized by corals.

Atmos will be heading to Florida next week with Aspen Ideas Climate to learn more about Miami’s solutions to tackling the climate crisis. In the meantime, head to Coral Morphologic to learn more.

Photographs courtesy of Vanessa Diaz and Coral Morphologic

#coral morphologic#miami#coral city camera#coral
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Embrace the Coral City lifestyle with all new Coral City Camera apparel & accessories. From anoraks to beanies, mugs to stickers, we've got you covered. 

Today we unveil our first collection of Coral City offerings with classic CCC Sunset and Globe designs from Brian Butler. 

All sales benefit the Coral City Foundation's efforts to research and restore Miami's aquatic ecosystems.

Shop Coral City @ https://coralmorphologic.bigcartel.com/category/coral-city-camera

#coral morphologic#coral city camera#brian butler#coral city
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A Tale of Two Corals (in the Anthropocene): The past summer’s record hot temperatures were devastating to South Florida’s reefs, wiping out a significant percentage of critically important staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis aka ACER). Staghorn is a keystone species, and the primary coral grown by restoration practitioners in the Caribbean. They grow fast, but can die a lot faster. 

In 2009 we discovered a unique strain of staghorn coral that had naturally recruited to one of the breakwaters on nearby Fisher Island. Since 2020 we’ve been helping NOAA cultivate fragments of this urban ACER on an experimental nursery adjacent to the Camera. 

In conjunction with University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef program we’ve been using the CCC site to test the resilience of staghorn corals they grow offshore. Like other FL restoration orgs, Rescue a Reef saw many of their outplanted ACER die this past summer. Finding strains that can withstand future heat stress is critical for long term success in restoring our reefs. 

As seen in this 7 month timelapse, a fragment of urban ACER (we’ve dubbed the ‘Ventura’ strain) not only didn’t bleach, but grew at a significant rate. The 2nd staghorn, one of the offshore strains, began strong, but quickly bleached, died, and then was eroded away by parrotfish.  

In early August, UM transported fragments of the ‘Ventura’ strain offshore where the water was cooler for safekeeping. While the ‘Ventura’ strain has proven successful in the nearshore environment, it is important to see how it fares in deeper water before amplifying it for restoration purposes. We are pleased to hear from Rescue a Reef that it is thriving in its new environment! Preliminary analysis of the ‘Ventura’ strain shows it is hosting Durusdinium glynni zooxanthellae, a symbiont known to provide massive corals with thermal tolerance. However, its presence in Caribbean staghorn corals is previously undocumented. Could ACER ‘Ventura’ help restore Miami’s inshore and offshore reefs? Can it confer resilient genetics to future offspring by spawning it in a lab? These are some of the exciting questions we seek to answer in the future!

#coral city camera#miami#coral morphologic
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With heaviest hearts we say a forever goodbye to our best boi Kardt. Beautiful Cat brother, friend to humans and animals alike, and most recently mentor to CM rookie, Shadow. Kardt was deeply loved and will be dearly missed. He was a ray of kind sunshine in this cruel world. He lived out all his 9 lives, the only sibling of his litter to make it in Miami, even surviving a bus hit. He scaled barbed wire fences and took part in wild territorial pissings. As we prepared to move our lab in 2015, we officially adopted him as he dodged a threat by our old lab landlord to dump him in the Everglades. He learned to be a house cat but also ruled the backyard. After being a loner for years, he welcomed Shadow into the CM family with open paws last year and it was beautiful to see him with a little friend again. For a year he taught Shadow how to be a good boi, and last week as Shadow became an adult, Kardt passed away. We love you always and forever, friend. RIP. ❤️❤️❤️

#lifeofkardt#coral morphologic#coralmorphologic#Kardt
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While bleaching has struck hard upon the offshore genotypes of staghorn and elkhorn coral transplanted experimentally to the CCC, some hopeful news is that the pioneering ‘urban’ strains of staghorn and elkhorn living alongside them have not yet bleached despite record hot temperatures. 

Taking no chances and erring on the side of caution, the good scientists at NOAA's AOML Coral Program have taken in clones of the two ‘urban’ genotypes of endangered elkhorn and staghorn corals native to Miami. 

In NOAA’s state-of-the-art Virginia Key lab, they will be provided with climate-controlled water where their well-being can be maintained until cooler water temps return. Their stay in the lab will also offer scientists the opportunity to analyze their genetics and microbiomes to try and understand the remarkable resilience of these two strains of endangered corals. 

It was the discovery of the mother colonies of these corals on Fisher Island in 2009 that sparked our ‘urban coral hypothesis’ of resilience, and inspired wider surveying of unexpected coastal locations to document the surprising local biodiversity of 26 stony coral species living on Miami-Dade infrastructure. We have seen these corals remain unbleached through extreme cold water temps in winter 2010 and the bleaching summers of 2014 and 2015. But with six weeks left of summer, this will likely be their biggest test of survival of their lives.

It is heartbreaking to realize that our oceans are becoming too hot to reliably keep corals alive. Coral restoration practitioners have been forced into triage mode. There is a desperate need to invest in land-based facilities and coral husbandry training in order to rapidly scale-up our ability to preserve their biodiversity as we slam headlong into a rapidly unfolding climate emergency. 

We will continue to monitor the health of their clones at the CCC CURES (Coral Urban Research Experimental Site) and hope that water temps don’t continue to rise. But with another 6 weeks left in summer, we have our fingers crossed and can only hope for the highest preservation of Floridian coral biodiversity possible. 

#miami#coral morphologic#coral city camera#coral#miamibeach#noaa aoml
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Reality check: Florida’s corals are suffering in this record-shattering summer heat. With water temps around 90F, corals are bleaching hard, including here in Coral City. 

With months still left in summer, we made the urgent call to rescue some of the most resilient urban Acropora being grown on the NOAA AOML CURES (Coral Urban Research Experimental Site) before they have a chance to bleach. 

Yesterday the good team from UM’s Rescue a Reef restoration program jumped into action and gathered up branches of a unique ‘urban’ staghorn strain from the CCC site and brought them offshore to their deeper offshore nursery (where water is a few degrees cooler and bleaching has not yet occurred).

We first noticed this strain growing on a Fisher Island shoreline in 2009; a highly unusual place for an endangered coral to call home. Through preliminary lab-testing, it appears the strain is hosting the bleaching-resistant zooxanthellae algae species known as Durusdinium, which may give it an edge over their Floridian cousins that don’t have this symbiotic microbe. Compared with the staghorn corals that were experimentally transplanted from offshore to the CCC (which have now fully bleached), this strain from the 33109 has doggedly kept its zooxanthellae and kept its color… so far. Taking no chances we are dedicated to preserving, researching, and eventually spawning this truly one-of-a-kind Miami coral. 

It is possible that this singular Miami strain of staghorn coral may offer scientists insight into how to ‘build a better coral’ with heat-resistant microbes, giving them an edge in the warming waters of the future…

…But let’s be real; there is no such thing as a ‘super coral’, there is no silver bullet, and reef health will only continue to get worse without a radical rethink of how we coexist with nature, and manage our collective future in this fishbowl called Earth. 

Corals demonstrate self-sufficiency by powering themselves with the most sustainable source of energy around: the Sun. When a coral bleaches, it loses its solar-powered symbiotic algae and becomes bone-white. The coral starves until water temps decrease and new zooxanthellae algae can recolonize. Bleaching in September means recovery in October is likely. Bleaching in mid-July is an harbinger of doom for Florida’s reef tract. 

Unable to swim to cooler water, a coral must adapt or die. But they simply cannot adapt fast enough to our ever-warming oceans. The energy powering humanity produces a lot of heat. And almost all of that heat goes into the ocean. Bone white life in sunlight is not natural, and the corals’ skeletons reflect a distress signal for all to plainly see. Our planet has a fever, and we’re just smoking cigarettes in the hospital.   

Oil is essentially solar energy that was captured by algae that died and sunk to to the bottom of the ocean. Over millions of years it is compressed into jet black liquid sunlight. Releasing its stored energy is like adding the Sun’s energy from a million years ago back into our summer sky (and oceans). 

To make matters worse, the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels acts like a blanket, trapping ever more heat in our atmosphere. No one wants an extra blanket in the summer, but we just keeping wrapping ourselves up ever more tightly. We’re living on borrowed carbon credits and kicking the bill to future generations to pay. Time is running out and the corals are screaming at us to make a change.

#coral city camera#miami#coral morphologic#coral
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