Restoring Reefs in Hot Waters

By Joe Vanhoose, Managing Editor

On March 3, the S.S. United States, the fastest ocean liner the world has ever seen, sailed into Mobile Bay under tow on its penultimate voyage. America’s flagship’s final trip will end a few miles off the coast of Fort Walton Beach, a couple hundred feet below the Gulf surface.

The 990-foot vessel will spend the next year being stripped of all hazardous materials at Modern American Recycling Services of Alabama (MARS), a major commercial ship recycling facility. Its signature red, white and blue funnels will be removed and preserved for a museum set to be built in Okaloosa County to memorialize the ship that still holds the "Blue Riband" for the fastest Atlantic Ocean crossing ever, a record it set on its maiden voyage in 1952.

Habitat creation is a major benefit, especially in our area... We have the country’s largest fishing fleet...moving fish every single day. As we increase the number of artificial reefs, it ensures our fishing sites aren’t getting hit too hard every day.

Off the coast of Fort Walton Beach, the ship will become the world’s largest artificial reef and, county and state officials hope, draw millions of divers and anglers for years to come, bringing economic and environmental benefits to the area.

“Creating more habitat increases the biomass of species we want to have.”

All over Florida, scientists, environmentalists and engineers are finding ways to restore coral species and create more artificial reefs to promote biodiversity, tourism and a line of defense for the state against hurricanes.

The challenge is daunting. Due to rising ocean temperatures and other factors, coral reefs across the world are becoming increasingly damaged. In Florida, a 2022 study by the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Studies found that 70 percent of Florida’s coral reefs are experiencing a net loss of reef habitat.

“It’s bad, the bleaching and the mortality, the disease we’ve seen is terrible,” said Ian Enochs, the head of AOML’s Coral Program. “But we can either just sit around and talk about how bad it is or we can figure out solutions. You start poking at the solutions, and there are tools.

“Where there is a will there’s a way and where there are tools there is a path forward, so we have to focus on that.”

Threats to Tourism, Infrastructure Protection

The value Florida’s coral reefs provide the state is multifaceted, Enochs said. The most obvious may be the tourism that the reefs generate, bringing in more than $1 billion annually in tourist spending.

The most important benefit may be how corals protect the Florida coastline – and the cities that dot it – from storm surge and wave energy. The estimated savings from these forces is $650 million a year, a significant number, Enochs said.

"I like to literally think of coral reefs as our infrastructure.” he said. “They’re no different from seawalls. They support all of this food and tourism and coastal protection. As a result, the technologies we are developing are associated with ways that we can repair our corals’ infrastructure because it is declining so much.”

The corals in South Florida were crippled by the highly contagious and lethal Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which was detected initially near Miami in 2014 and swept through the entire Florida Reef Tract, the only living coral barrier reef system in the continental U.S.

Data from NOAA’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program and from National Geodetic Surveys was used to calculate the carbonate budget of The Florida Reef Tract in 2022. Out of 723 reef sites, scientists found that 506 reef sites were losing reef habitat annually.

“The (Stony Coral) disease wiped out about 50% of our hard corals,” said Jessica Miles, chair of the Environmental Science Department at Palm Beach State College (PBSC) and leader of The Reef Hope Project. “But teams of people rescued living coral and brought them into facilities that I like to think of as an ‘ark’ to keep them alive and sustain genetic lineages.”

Coming Together For Solutions

Miles has spent most of her personal and professional life dedicated to research and education regarding marine life protection. It was only natural then, she said, that she would choose a project related to this cause for her sabbatical work while at PBSC.

The Reef Hope Project was created as a multidisciplinary effort that not only involved Miles’ students in environmental sciences, but also engaged art students and those studying engineering.

“I know that most environmental problems are going to require a team of dedicated people, with a whole host of skill sets to solve them,” Miles said. “So why not model this for my students and create a project that deals with real-world issues and inspires students to put their diverse knowledge and abilities into collaborative action.”

Palm Beach State was the first college in South Florida to participate in the work of the Smithsonian Institution’s

National Museum of Natural History Global ARMS Program. ARMS, or autonomous reef monitoring structures, are deployed around the world to help scientists study changes in marine biodiversity and improve ocean health.

The Reef Hope Project installed monitoring structures in and just outside the Jupiter Inlet in 2017. In August 2022, Miles and two dive teams retrieved three ARMS. Smithsonian scientists traveled from Washington, D.C., to the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, where they trained Miles and her team in the techniques used to examine the marine life found living in the ARMS.

“What an honor to work alongside researchers from the Smithsonian Institute and to contribute to their global dataset on marine biodiversity,” Miles said. “The Reef Hope Project work created an atmosphere of discovery as we added our ‘dot’ of Jupiter to the global map. To be a part of something bigger than ourselves correlates with the idea that all life is interconnected and each species, from the greatest to the smallest, has value.”

Speaking of small, the motile life The Reef Hope Project works with and catalogs is often less than a centimeter in length. Miles has created a traveling exhibit highlighting their research findings, which will be featured at nature centers, museums and libraries throughout the state.

“We found over 500 species living together in an area the size of a birthday cake,” she said. “And we aren’t talking about individuals here; we are talking about different species!”

As Enochs points out, natural reefs have the highest concentrations of biodiversity in our oceans. They could still prove to be a goldmine for genetics, medical compounds and more. And, as much as the Florida Reef Tract has declined in health in the last several years, Enochs points out that natural reefs are self-repairing – they can grow themselves back.

This fact is one of the many reasons why Enochs has a tremendous amount of hope in restoring the natural reefs. That, and that AOML has tools right now that work on growing coral.

“We’ve identified two new types of coral that are stronger, and we can learn from them – we’ve grown coral in the lab much faster than the field,” Enochs said. “We can get them to reproduce in our lab, which means we can use genetics like in agriculture to identify traits to produce the most robust crops.

“In addition, we can stress harden these species like a coral gym. We stress them out and then cool them and allow them to relax, and that toughens them up.”

Enochs and his team are working on engineering and developing control and feedback systems, among several other projects. They are working on robotic systems that could be used to maintain and clean corals of algae, as the current cleaning process is labor intensive – they are currently cleaned with toothbrushes by hand.

“You think about planting millions of corals and you’re using toothbrushes, think of the army of people you’d need – armed with toothbrushes,” he said. “You think about how automation and robotics work in industries where you have these varying dynamics – corals are not that because they just sit.

“This is a challenge that is very feasible because we can manipulate it in a very controlled environment. It’s an interesting engineering problem and the solutions are accessible.”

We found over 500 species living together in an area the size of a birthday cake...

And we aren’t talking about individuals here; we are talking about different species!

Artificial Reefs

Because of the rising ocean temperatures, Miles and other scientists anticipate some coral species will migrate farther north to where temperatures are more comfortable for them. Artificial reefs can serve as a sort of stepping stone and provide these coral with a substrate to settle upon. She and her students created a large artificial reef sculpture and deployed it locally off the coast. The stainless steel, 10-ton, 11-foot-tall statue represents a DNA helix in the shape of the infinity symbol created over two years by more than 60 students and five faculty members in different disciplines at PBSC.

In partnership with the Reef Hope Project, the Andrew "Red" Harris artificial reef 1.5 miles northeast of Jupiter Inlet is now home to 234 artificial reef modules and additional boulder piles that have been donated to Palm Beach County.

“We literally want to provide any support we can for the coral, to encourage their survival, because they are being hit from multiple directions,” she said. “I hope someday that our sculpture is covered by living, thriving coral and that their role as a keystone species, essentially a support for hundreds of other forms of marine life, is fulfilled.”

Off the Panhandle coast – too far north for natural corals – Okaloosa County officials have added 14 artificial reefs – ranging from old tugboats and dinner cruiseliners to military vessels – in the last five years. The sunken vessels help replenish fish populations and provide habitats for people to dive and fish.

The S.S. United States is the county’s most ambitious project yet. The ship was taken out of service by the United States Line in 1969 and mothballed by the U.S. Navy for the next decade. Passing through a series of owners, the ship's fittings and furniture were auctioned off in 1984, and its interior was completely gutted to remove asbestos in the early 1990s. The ship was seized by U.S. Marshals after its owners were unable to pay debtors and towed to Philadelphia in 1996.

The ship wouldn’t move from Pier 82 in Philadelphia until its voyage to Mobile began in February. The S.S. United States Conservancy acquired the ship in 2011 and tried for years to find a buyer and partner who would renovate the ship as a floating hotel or convention center or even a cruise line who would restore it to its original grandeur. But the costs of such a project ultimately made it unfeasible.

With the United States’ future seemingly destined for the scrapyard, Okaloosa County’s plan for sinking the vessel and creating the world’s largest artificial reef provided a way for the liner to live on.

“When court ruled the vessel had to be moved out of its Pier 82 home, that’s when we contacted the Conservancy to see if creating an artificial reef was even an option in their mind,” Fogg said. “As time went on and we explored options with a museum and how we are going to honor this vessel throughout the entire process, that started to change their attitudes.”

To get the vessel ready for its final voyage, Fogg and his team have several engineering considerations. First and foremost, they needed to see if the ship could travel without sinking.

“We had to do an analysis to find where the center of gravity is, because so much has been pulled off of the ship, it’s significantly lower than what was used in models,” Fogg said. “We had to demonstrate it could handle full weather conditions and not tip over, so we crawled through the whole vessel looking at structural integrity. It’s in remarkably good shape.”

In Mobile, the United States will be stripped of any Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and lead in the paint, and all insulation and wiring will be taken out – in fact, everything that isn’t metal will be removed. There is still fuel residue in many of the ship’s 120 fuel tanks that will need to be pumped out.

The entire project will cost $10 million, Fogg said, with a much larger return on investment expected as the ship becomes an international tourist and diver attraction.

By removing the ship’s stacks, the top deck of the ship will ultimately come to rest in about 55 to 60 feet of Gulf water – well within recreational dive limits. Being that close to the surface, Fogg anticipates the ship will begin providing habitat benefits quickly, with a full ecosystem developing from the top down in a few years.

While they don’t provide the same level of ecosystem services that a natural coral reef does, Enochs said, projects like the United States are still quite valuable from a recreation and destination perspective.

The situation is bad – don’t get me wrong –but I know we can do something about it, and we know engineering is a critical component of that.

Meanwhile, AOML, the Reef Hope Project and several other groups and scientists across the state will continue finding ways to ensure Florida’s natural coral reefs survive. “It’s not like we need to invent fusion or teleportation –this is not so far out there,” Enochs said. “We have these tools already. Honestly, we can do this.