Florida Reef Tract

node · earth · Florida Keys and south-east Florida

The reef system running along the Florida Keys and the south-east Florida coast, the only extensive shallow coral reef in the continental United States. It matters to this Journey out of proportion to its size for two reasons. It is where stony coral tissue loss disease was first observed, off Miami-Dade County in 2014, before the outbreak spread through most of the Caribbean. And it is the most heavily restored reef on Earth, with large in-water nurseries of staghorn and elkhorn coral run by universities, agencies and NGOs — which made the summer of 2023 an unintended experiment. When water temperatures in the Keys reached extreme levels that July, nursery stock died alongside wild colonies, and some nurseries were evacuated to land-based tanks. A reef that had been restored for a decade demonstrated in a single summer that restoration does not confer heat tolerance.