Saving Seafood

FLORIDA: ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: Scientists warn rare Florida reef could be destroyed again

October 7, 2025 — Beneath the surface of the Atlantic, about 15 miles off the coast of Fort Pierce, lies one of the most unique coral reefs in the world — and one of the most fragile.

Known as the Oculina Bank, this 300-square-mile deep-water reef was the first of its kind ever discovered.

But this protected ecosystem now faces potential destruction as federal officials consider reopening parts of it to shrimp trawling after decades of restrictions.

The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, one of eight federally appointed councils across the country, proposed two amendments this year that would allow commercial shrimp boats to drag massive nets across portions of the reef.

The proposals directly respond to a Trump administration executive order calling for reduced fishing regulations and enhanced economic opportunities for the seafood industry.

Read the full article at WPTV

US pioneers restoration of deep water corals damaged by country’s worst oil spill

June 2, 2025 — In the twilight depths of the Gulf of Mexico, about as deep down as a football field is long, U.S. Navy divers carefully snip small branches of corals with gloved hands. Their voices crackle through communication systems to the ship above, distorted to high-pitched tones by the helium mixtures they breathe.

“These guys, they’re tough, tough Navy dudes that are saturation experimental divers,” Chris Gardner, a U.S. government fisheries biologist on the team that oversees deepwater coral restoration in the Gulf, told Mongabay. “But the audio can be a little goofy because they’re breathing mostly helium. So, there’s definitely some Mickey Mouse effects going on.”

The surreal scene, of highly trained Navy divers speaking in cartoon voices while performing precise underwater surgery on orange and purple coral colonies, illustrates the extraordinary measures underway to restore ecosystems damaged by the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon spill, the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

This work marks one of the world’s first attempts at deep-sea coral restoration, and the largest to date, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency in charge of the restoration.

Read the full article at Mongabay

US senator warns of warming, plastic threats to world’s oceans and fisheries

May 9, 2025 — U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) took to the Senate floor 7 May to warn his colleagues of the threat the warming climate and plastic pollution poses to the world’s oceans and fisheries.

“In the 10 minutes that it takes me to give this speech, the oceans will absorb 4,000 Hiroshima detonations’ worth of heat,” Whitehouse said. “That is why seawater off the Florida Keys hit jacuzzi temperatures. That is why measuring devices along our coasts show a foot of sea level rise already. That is why fish species are moving about and fisheries are collapsing. That is why the world’s coral reefs are bleaching out – over 80 percent of the world’s reefs hit in the last ocean heating surge caused by fossil fuel.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Scientists warn coral restoration can’t keep pace with global reef collapse

April 30, 2025 — Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress.

Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds.

“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.

Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”

“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.

Read the full story at Mongabay

FLORIDA: Gov. DeSantis announces $5 million for coral reef recovery, additional day to lobster mini-season

June 20, 2024 — Governor Ron DeSantis made a South Florida stop Wednesday to announce an additional $5 million in funding to create additional artificial reef habitats. He also announced an extra day for the spiny lobster mini-season exclusively for Florida residents.

The office of the governor says the funding will support the establishment of an innovative framework for installing, overseeing, and preserving artificial reef habitats in the Florida Keys.

Officials close to DeSantis said the governor had previously allocated $9.5 million to Florida’s Coral Reef Restoration and Recovery Initiative.

Read the full article at CBS News

FLORIDA: DeSantis says Florida makes preservation of coral reefs a top priority

June 20, 2024 — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Wednesday in the Florida Keys that the has made conservation efforts a top priority and will continue to do so through continued appropriations for coral reef restoration.

“We have done, since I’ve been governor, historic investments and conservation efforts in making sure that Florida’s waterways are clean and making sure that we’re restoring the Everglades so water flows to Florida Bay like God intended,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis said that an important focus of the is coral reefs and supporting the restoration and protection of reefs. He added that no other administration in the history of the state of Florida has done more.

Read the full article at The Center Square

Not all underwater reefs are made of coral − the US has created artificial reefs from sunken ships, radio towers, boxcars and even voting machines

January 21, 2024 — When people hear about underwater reefs, they usually picture colorful gardens created from coral. But some reefs are anchored to much more unusual foundations.

For more than a century, people have placed a wide assortment of objects on the seafloor off the U.S. coast to provide habitat for marine life and recreational opportunities for fishing and diving. Artificial reefs have been created from decommissioned ships, chicken transport cages, concrete pipes, rail cars and more.

We study how ocean-dwelling fish use artificial reefs in the U.S. and beyond. Through our research, we have learned that artificial reefs can be hot spots for large predatory fish such as groupers and jacks. They also can serve as stepping stones for reef fish expanding their range northward with warming water temperatures and as rest stops for sharks.

Artificial reefs can be strategically designed and placed to optimize fish habitat. But although they provide valuable ecological services, no one has inventoried how many of these structures exist in U.S. waters or how much seafloor they occupy.

Read the full article at The Conversation 

First global assessment of the sustainability of coral reef fisheries

September 27, In a world’s-first study of the global state of coral reef fisheries, a team of researchers estimates that about half of the world’s reefs failed at least one of two key sustainability tests: either their fish stocks are depleted to dangerously low levels, or ongoing fishing pressure exceeds the fish stocks’ capacity to recover.

A worldwide fishing crisis in the late 20th century made headlines as commercial stocks of Peruvian anchovies, Atlantic and Scandinavian herring and Northern cod plummeted. But by preventing overfishing, effective, science-based management improved stocks dramatically. However, fishing for a single species is much less common on coral reefs, where fishers often use methods that target large numbers of species whose biology is very different and often poorly characterized. For such “multi-species fisheries”, it has always been challenging to determine if overfishing is taking place. The new study offers an innovative way forward.

Read the full article at Smithsonian Magazine

Lost fishing gear represents up to 75 percent of plastic found on coral reefs

July 20, 2022 — Lost and discarded fishing “ghost gear” accounted for as much as 75 percent of plastic pollution found on the world’s coral reefs, according to a study, “Plastic pollution on the world’s coral reefs,” published 12 July in Nature.

Every one of the 85 coral reefs included in the global study was found polluted with plastic, including deeper reefs between 30 and 150 meters deep. Comoros was found to have the most-polluted reefs, with nearly 84,500 plastic items found per square kilometer, while the Marshall Islands had the least-polluted reefs at 580 pieces of plastic per square kilometer.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Earth is likely just a decade a way from hitting 1.5°C of global warming — and scientists say it will be “catastrophic” for coral reefs

February 4, 2022 — The United Nations has warned the continued use of fossil fuels is hurtling the planet to 1.5°C of global warming, relative to 1850-1900 levels, a threshold that will result in “unprecedented” extreme weather events. According to new research, climate change will also result in coral bleaching that will be “catastrophic” for reefs, and potentially, the marine life that live around them.

Bleaching can occur from a change in ocean temperature, pollution, overexposure to sunlight and low tides. Any of these influences can stress coral and causes it to release the algae that live in its tissues. The loss of algae, corals’ primary food source, causes the coral to turn white and makes it more susceptible to disease.

Reefs are “among the most biologically diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth,” serving as a vital resource for an estimated 25% of all marine life, which depend on reefs for their life cycles, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly half a billion people also depend on reefs for food, coastal protection, tourism and fisheries’ income.

But as climate change continues to negatively impact the planet, it will “overwhelm” those reefs, researchers said, and almost none of them will be able to escape a grave scenario.

Read the full story at CBS News