Our Greatest Fear For This Mission Is...?

In 2014, the first incidence of a strange new coral disease was reported near #Miami. It would appear as an ominous white band that slowly crept across the coral, creating blotchy white patches of exposed skeleton that proved fatal to the coral in up to 100 percent of cases. Within five years, the disease, now named Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, has spread further north than Palm Beach and down into the Florida Keys. Outbreaks have been reported in Mexico and Jamaica, as well as St. Maarten and the US Virgin Islands. This week, #OceanX and scientific partners Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Mote Marine Lab are launching a multi-disciplinary survey across the entirety of the Florida Keys, America’s largest living great barrier reef. One of our main concerns will be to take extreme care not to transmit SCTLD ourselves. As we visit over 100 sites, we’ll have to sanitize all of our equipment, as SCTLD is suspected to be water-borne. Examining the difference between extremely healthy reefs as well as sick and degraded ones will inform better stewardship and management, which the state of Florida has been working aggressively towards in recent years, as the reefs generate 6.4 billion in sales and income annually, not to mention the flood protection offered by reefs for homes and property. The mission starts this week, follow on all our social channels. Many thanks to our partners at Bloomberg Philanthropies and their Vibrant Oceans Initiative.