-: Good evening. We're pleased to have you join us
for our annual Seaside Chat speaker series
about ocean topics associated
with Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
and the Gulf of Mexico.
We're also part
of the National Marine Sanctuary Webinar series
and the NOAA Science Seminar series.
During the presentation,
all attendees will be in listen only mode.
You are welcome to type questions for the presenter
into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
on the right side of your screen.
You may also let us know about any technical issues
you are having by typing in there,
and we will be monitoring the incoming questions
and technical issues and we'll respond to them
as soon as possible.
We are recording this session and we'll post the recording
to the National Marine Sanctuaries
and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
We will notify registered participants via email
when these recordings are available.
And for those of you who are interested,
we have a document of links
to additional resources on today's topic.
In the handouts pane of the control panel,
you simply click on the item to download it.
Hello, everyone. My name is Kelly Drinnen
and I'm the Education Outreach Specialist
for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
I'll be facilitating today's webinar from Dickinson, Texas.
Also with me today are Kelly O'Connell
and Leslie Whaylen Clift, other staff members
who will be helping me
with the backend administration of this webinar.
In 1972, the United States ushered
in a new era of ocean conservation
by creating the National Marine Sanctuary system.
Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and 2 marine national monuments
that conserve more than 620,000 square miles
of spectacular ocean and Great Lakes waters.
It's an area nearly the size of Alaska.
These marine protected areas
are kind of like national parks, but underwater.
The National Marine Sanctuaries Act gives NOAA the authority
to designate special areas of the marine environment
as national marine sanctuaries.
It also mandates
that the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
conduct research, monitoring,
resource protection, education, outreach and management
of America's underwater treasures
to preserve them for future generations.
In addition to being places for recreation and research,
national marine sanctuaries are also living classrooms
where people can see, touch, and learn
about the nation's Great Lakes and ocean treasures.
This webinar series is just one part
of that national education and outreach effort.
The Seaside Chat series is hosted
by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
the only national marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
This sanctuary consists of 17 banks,
or small underwater mountains, that are home
to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world,
amazing algal and sponge communities, and deep reef habitats
featuring an abundance of black coral and gorgonians.
We invite you to learn more about us
by visiting the sanctuary website at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
Today's presentation focuses on hidden clues
about the history and future
of the Flower Garden Bank's coral reefs.
In 2006 and '07,
while conducting annual long-term monitoring activities
at the Flower Garden Banks,
researchers discovered remnants of a fossil reef comprised
of elkhorn and staghorn corals,
which are species almost non-existent on our reefs today.
This discovery has dramatically altered our understanding
of reef development at the Flower Garden Banks
and the response of coral communities
to changing climate through time.
This evening, Bill Precht will take us back in time
to help us understand our coral reefs from the inside out.
William Precht is both a geologist and ecologist by training
and has been working on tropical ecosystem since 1978.
Since completing his graduate degree
from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School
of Marine and Atmospheric Science,
Mr. Precht has specialized in the assessment, monitoring,
restoration and rehabilitation of various coastal resources,
especially coral reef, seagrass, and mangrove systems.
His contributions to the professional and academic community
are nationally and internationally recognized,
particularly regarding coral reef ecology and paleoecology,
disturbance ecology, carbonate sedimentology,
historical ecology, and the application
of ecological principles to coastal restoration.
Bill's work draws
upon significant state-of-the-art research experience,
excuse me, and field studies and theoretical analysis.
Since 2012, Mr. Precht has served as the Director
of Marine and Coastal Programs
with the environmental consulting firm
Dial Cordy and Associates Incorporated in Miami, Florida.
Prior to joining DCA, he worked for NOAA
in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary,
where he was the manager and team lead
of the damage assessment, restoration
and resource protection program
where his work was focused on protecting,
conserving and restoring marine
and coastal resources throughout the Florida Keys.
From 2002 to 2008, he served
as the Chief Scientist on a joint contract
with the Minerals Management Service and NOAA,
performing the long-term reef monitoring
at Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
in the Gulf of Mexico.
And I believe it's that experience
he'll be drawing on this evening. Welcome, Bill.
-: Good evening, everyone.
Thank you very much, Kelly,
for that warm and wonderful introduction.
And I can't wait to talk about this presentation
because this exactly was done
when I was on that contract
with Minerals Management Service, now BOEM,
and the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
And I'm gonna go right to the slides
because I've got a lot to show you
and lots to talk about today.
-: All right, looks good.
Take it away. -: Okay.
I don't see my slides for some reason.
-: Okay.
-: Oh, there it's, I got it, I got it, I got it.
Okay. So the title of this talk is
Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks from the Inside Out.
And when we were studying the Flower Garden Banks
doing our annual monitoring,
we serendipitously ran into a few wonderful discoveries,
and it's those discoveries that were really outside the fold
of really what our tasks were.
But I say that in small part because our tasks were
to really enhance the science understanding,
the scientific understanding of the Flower Garden Banks.
And through this annual monitoring program,
we had, on any given trip, 20 scientists on the boat,
which included our team of scientific divers
that were doing the monitoring.
But we also would invite visiting scientists.
Whenever we would have bunk space available
on the liveaboard vessel,
we would invite these scientists.
And it was often through these visiting scientists
that many of these wonderful discoveries were made.
And last week, Steve Gittings gave a presentation
and he called it the best job ever.
And I would say in my 35 plus year career
as a coral reef scientist,
that contract with the Flower Garden Banks
was the best job I ever had.
And part of the reason for that was
because I got to share the work
with two of my best friends
and two of the best coral reef ecologists in the world,
Dr. Rich Aronson and Dr. Ken Deslarzes.
And we basically put a team together
and we were co-PIs on that contract.
And it was basically the three of us
putting our heads together
and this is what a lot of the work came out of.
So I can't take credit for this.
This has to be shared with my co-PIs.
There's special thanks that also needs to be given
to a bunch of people from Flower Garden Banks at the time,
Emma Hickerson, GP Schmahl, Marissa Nuttall.
There was also James Sinclair and Greg Boland from BOEM.
-: Bill. -: Beth Zimmer, yes.
Kelly: Sorry to interrupt.
We're getting some garbled audio,
which may be a bandwidth issue from where you are.
So I think I'm gonna ask you to turn off your camera
just so that we can hear you better.
-: Okay. I'll do that.
Kelly: In the control panel right below the microphone
is a little camera symbol.
And just click it off.
-: I don't see it on my.
Kelly: All right. Oh, I can turn it off
at this end, I think.
Bill: Okay. Yeah, that'd be great. Sorry.
Kelly: All right. Got it.
Bill: Yeah, 'cause I don't need it anymore.
That's great. Thank you.
Sorry about that.
So again, I just wanted to thank
all these people on the list.
Dr. Les Kaufman, who's listed here, by the way,
in year two of the contract,
he became the fourth co-PI with our team.
And we brought him in specifically
because he's a world-renowned fish specialist,
and fish ecologist and coral reef ecologist.
So he was a strong addition to our team.
So as everybody knows, the Flower Garden Banks sit
110 miles or so offshore in the Gulf of Mexico,
and they are situated on salt domes.
And they are these spectacular features
that come up from the bottom of the Gulf,
the floor of the Gulf.
And when they come into shallow enough water,
they have these really remarkable benthic communities
that live on their surface.
So again, they're perched atop salt domes.
They're the northernmost coral reefs
in the continental United States.
They're formed in most part by very large stony corals.
Acroporid corals, the elkhorn and staghorn corals,
historically were absent from the banks.
So from the time that people started studying
the Flower Garden Banks,
no acroporid corals had ever been seen
in either the sediment and/or living on the surface.
Another big feature about the Flower Garden Banks,
and as Kelly pointed out before,
is they're some of the most remarkable reefs
even today on the planet
in that they have greater than 50% live coral cover.
There are some 23 known coral species
that live on the top of the banks
and hundreds of other reef invertebrate species,
250 or so fish species and so on.
So today I'm gonna focus most of my presentation
on discoveries that we made at the East Flower Garden Banks,
but we also made some of these discoveries at the West Bank,
but specifically the East Bank was the place
where we did most of our discovery.
And this graphic,
this beautiful cartoon on the left
was from the original classic publication
on the Flower Garden Banks
that was written by Rezak, Bright and McGrail.
What you see there is the top far left
is the top of the bank showing these very large head corals
and massive boulder corals.
And then there's a shoulder that goes down
and it flattens off and then it goes down
to the deep depths below the photic zone.
As I pointed out before, Caribbean acroporids,
specifically elkhorn and staghorn coral,
were never present at the Flower Garden Banks.
And the reason why I'm pointing this out is
because this was one of the amazing discoveries that we had.
And I'll talk about that.
And when we were doing our studies,
our monitoring studies,
Rich Aronson wrote this paper in 2005
and he pointed out the fact
that one of the reasons why the Flower Gardens
still had so much oral cover
was because they didn't have acroporids.
And these branching acroporid corals Caribbean-wide
had seen this catastrophic disease run through
starting in the mid 1970s through the early 1990s.
And it decimated coral reefs
throughout Florida and the Caribbean
with losses of some 90 plus percent
of all the branching acroporid species Caribbean-wide.
Well, if you don't have those corals to lose,
you don't lose them.
So a lot of the original catastrophic losses that were seen
on Caribbean reefs and Florida reefs were due
to the loss of those two species.
However, we didn't have them on the Flower Garden Banks.
So because of that, the Flower Garden Banks were blind
to the rest of what was going on in the Caribbean.
And because of that, they really,
the banks themselves with all these other corals persisted
in this very, very high coral cover.
And the reason why it was postulated that Acropora species
had been absent at the Flower Gardens was
that the water temperature historically had been too cold
during the winter months.
And there were many presentations
and publications that described that.
So as we know, today we're in a warming world.
And a lot of projections had been made early on.
And this one is a figure from Dr. Joan Kleypas
as showing what would happen
if the sea water temperatures
around the world got warmer.
And what you would see is you would see an expansion
of reef development at the margins of reef growth,
which is the approximate 18 degrees C isotherm.
And if you notice where America is,
North America is on this map,
you see that dot in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
right where that orange bar is.
And that is going right through the Flower Garden Banks.
So one of the things we know
about the biological response of climate change has been
that organisms change their migration patterns,
their phenologies and their ranges
by responding to these warmer temperatures.
And the range shifts that we've been seeing have been
for the most part moving towards the poles.
And if you're in a mountain setting,
it's actually migrating up into higher
and higher alpine settings.
So the biological response of organisms to global warming
has been that warmer species are now being found
in areas that they weren't found before,
that where traditionally only colder species were found.
So going back to the map of the Caribbean,
this is a map that shows the number of genera, not species,
but genera of coral that live within the Caribbean.
And the area within the yellow is the area
that had acroporid corals.
And notice there are two areas
that are highlighted in orange, the Flower Garden Banks
and the southeast coast of Florida,
but north of the Florida Keys.
That basically was an area that was rife
for the origin and acceptance basically
of these potential range shift species,
which includes corals.
And in fact, acroporid corals started to move
up the east coast of Florida.
And myself and Rich Aronson wrote a paper
back in the early 2000s
called "Climate flickers and range shifts of corals".
And basically what we talked about in that manuscript was
that there was this movement of corals north
of their previously known range.
So the green on this map
is the present day Florida reef track,
which extends from just south of Miami,
about Fowey Rocks lighthouse and Biscayne National Park
down through the Florida Keys and out to the Dry Tortugas.
The area in orange was an area that there are fossil reefs
and they extend north up to Palm Beach County.
But the area of orange, there were very, very, very few
if ever a Acropora species found.
And in the late '90s, early 2000s,
all of a sudden there were discoveries
of these large thickets of Acropora cervicornis
off of Fort Lauderdale.
And this is some 25 kilometers north
of their previously known main range.
Now it wasn't to say that there weren't one-offs there,
but these large thickets had never been described before.
And in addition, we also found Acropora palmata.
And this was a palmata that I photographed in 2003
off of Pompano Beach Pier,
which is in Northern Broward County,
which is almost in Palm Beach County.
So it's a pretty amazing discovery.
And a few others have been found
throughout the waters of Broward County since.
And these were the first known poleward examples
of expansion of a Caribbean coral genus.
And as I mentioned, based upon these other papers
that described what the response would be,
this is most parsimoniously explained as being shifted
due to recent patterns of warming.
Interesting at the same time,
there were a whole bunch of new species that were appearing
at the Flower Garden Banks,
which included Tubastraea coccinea
which is an exotic ahermatypic coral species,
Dichocoenia stokesi, which was found by Emma Hickerson
and the team on the East Bank in 2005 and '06.
Nassau grouper had been described in 2006.
And a person on our team,
a woman by the name of Beth Zimmer,
she described some colonies of Acropora palmata.
And this was written up in "Coral Reefs" back in 2005.
And the first discovery of Acropora palmata
was actually made on the West Bank
and it's the figure in the upper left.
And this is a colony of Acropora palmata
that was first found by Sarah Bernhardt
who was working for the Flower Garden Sanctuary at the time.
And the picture below taken by Emma Hickerson
back around 2011, 2012, is a photograph of the colony
that Beth found when we were doing the long-term monitoring.
So the question is
how do these corals,
I mean, we understand that they get there
and they live there now
because it's slightly warmer than it was in the past.
At least that's the possible explanation.
But how do they get there?
And this is a picture of Beth's colony in Summer 2002.
I understand since it's gone through some ups and downs
due to some storms and some other effects.
But how do Acropora palmata
get to the Flower Garden Banks
when there are no reefs that are even close?
And the way palmata reproduces sexually is
it broadcasts its gametes, its eggs and its sperm
into the water column once a year,
generally after the August full moon.
And they basically fertilize in the water
and they're carried by currents.
And then they eventually settle out
and they'll land on a reef
and they'll basically colonize that reef.
Usually the pelagic larvae become competent to settle
within five days of fertilization,
but they can remain planktonic for up to 20 days.
And this is from a study
from Iliana Baums published in 2005.
Alexis Lugo-Fernandez
of, at the time, Minerals Management Service basically
tried to do a reconstruction.
He was a physical oceanographer,
tried to do a reconstruction of how do you get things
to the Flower Garden Banks based
on all the different currents
that are in the Gulf of Mexico and the closest reefs.
How do you get Acropora there?
And basically, like Iliana said it,
the larvae stay available for 20 days.
But according to Alexis,
it took 55 to 135 days to get to the Flower Garden Banks
based on his different methods
and different circulation patterns and routes to get there.
So it seemed unlikely that this could happen.
So one of the things that happened during our monitoring was
we had this amazing hurricane.
And it was Hurricane Rita that went right over the bank
and it went over during spawning season.
And it also shows the direction of the loop current,
and the loop currents that sit over the bank.
And based on some projections that were made
that basically the larvae can actually suck on the tail
of that hurricane and be dragged along
and can actually make it there in less than the 20 days.
So there are ways to get them there.
And this one is kind of a crazy,
hang on to the back end of a hurricane to get there.
But using this observation
of this Acropora discovery
that we made during our monitoring,
we thought, well, if we go back
to the Holocene thermal optimum,
which was between 10 and 6,000 years ago,
there was evidence from both terrestrial
and coastal environments that there were similar movements
of organisms both north when it got warmer
and then retracted south when it got colder.
And this is looking at Holocene temperature variation.
So this is temperature
over the last 12,000 years of Earth history.
And you see that there's a period of time
between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago or so
where temperatures were on average warmer
than they were up until about 1970.
And today they're basically now exceeding those temperatures
of the mid-Holocene.
And the black line that you see is the smoothed average
of all the different curves.
And you can see again how the current straight line
up on the far right of the figure
is in excess of the mid-Holocene warm.
But there was a time in the mid-Holocene,
again when temperatures were warmer
than the historical known average
for the Flower Garden Banks.
So like I said, we know that during the mid-Holocene
there were these poleward shifts of species,
which included the boreal mollusks found in Greenland
that before were only found
in the maritime provinces
of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada.
And there were also warm water oysters and scallops found
off of Sable Island.
And in coral reefs studied by Charlie Veron
in Japan showed that the mid-Holocene climate flicker
also correlated with the northernmost expansion
of coral reefs in the Caribbean.
So I don't wanna dwell on this too much,
but basically this period of time
during the Holocene optimum was a time
when it was really beautiful for reef development.
So using that idea and then thinking
about what happened in Florida
at the same time it's going on in the Flower Gardens,
but also knowing that in Florida we had these fossil reefs
that underpinned the reef from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale.
And when we studied these reefs off of Florida,
we found that between 10 and 6,000 years ago,
there were these amazing reefs
that extended some 550 kilometers north
of their known historic range.
And these were massive, beautiful barrier reefs
that formed on the east coast of Florida
some 10 to 6,000 years ago.
And they were dominated by elkhorn and staghorn corals.
This formation or accumulation of these thick deposits,
these are sub-fossil and fossilized branches,
giant branches of Acropora palmata living at a reef crest.
And these were found again north
of where they currently exist in Florida
and up to 150 kilometers north of their present range.
So we postulated that this implies
that these Acropora species are capable
of responding very rapidly to climate change
through range expansions
and then possibly contractions in the past.
And what we did was a whole bunch of authors from the USGS,
Lauren Toth, Alex Modys,
Rich Aronson was involved in the study,
we looked at the expansion
of when these things occurred and how far they went north.
And you can see on this map that there's a yellow line.
And that yellow line is the maximum extent of reef building
during the mid-Holocene thermal optimum.
And then in the late Holocene, as temperatures got cooler,
these reefs contracted further south
and then they were found only in that orange area.
And then after the little ice age couple hundred years ago,
they basically contracted south to Fowey Rocks,
which is again approximately equivalent with Miami.
So using this known latitude and expansion
of fossil reefs in the early middle Holocene
with what was going on in Florida,
and then the known discovery of recent Acropora
at the Flower Garden Banks,
and then also reconstructing the sea level history
of the Flower Garden Banks, we had a hypothesis
that, well, wouldn't it be likely that if it was so warm
that far north in Florida that it was that warm
in the northern Gulf of Mexico,
similar to future projections,
and that maybe there were acroporids
that were underlying the reef basically
in the Flower Garden Banks.
And these would be potential examples
of range shifts in the past.
And this is the sea level curve for the Gulf of Mexico.
We know that at the peak of the last glaciation
some 20,000 years ago,
sea level was about 130 meters lower than it was today.
And as the glaciers melted
through the recent period, sea level has risen.
So at one point the water in the Gulf of Mexico,
the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico
was some 400 feet offshore
from the coast of Texas and Louisiana and Florida.
So imagine how small the Gulf of Mexico was
in comparison to the way it is today.
This is a picture, a cartoon drawing
of the different banks
of the area around the Flower Gardens sanctuary.
And notice in this graph
that you have these boxes in the upper right,
and what we basically have there are temperatures.
And when the temperature gets less than 18 degrees,
temperature is not perfect for reef growth.
And if they're also too deep,
they're out of the photic zone
so they're not perfect for reef growth.
So there's what we call a Goldilocks zone.
And the Goldilocks zone is an area
where water temperatures stay above 18 degrees C
and are within the photic zone.
And the banks that fill that qualification or classification
are the Flower Garden Banks,
the East and West Flower Garden Banks,
which is shown by number six,
which sticks up into that Goldilocks zone.
Reconstructing the geological past,
this was again from that wonderful publication
on the Flower Gardens by Rezak, Bright and McGrail,
and this is their sketch, cartoon drawing
of what the West Flower Garden Bank must have looked like
during the sea level low stand
of the last major glaciation in the Gulf of Mexico.
And basically what you see there,
what the Flower Garden Banks are today,
these salt domes that stick up off the bottom
are these islands in the Gulf of Mexico,
right essentially next to what is now the beach.
What are today 110 miles offshore
were basically very, very close to the shoreline
at 20,000 years ago.
And when we take the reconstruction
of the Flower Gardens
and we take today's 3D mosaic of the bank
and we drop sea level,
we basically have this beautifully exposed island,
like I said, and this is the East Bank.
And as we raise sea level,
as we melt the ice caps,
we then get to negative 90 meters
and the lower parts of the bank's flood.
And then we flood some more,
we melt some more glaciers, we get to minus 60 meters.
And now we have a smaller island
where only the cap of the bank there is exposed.
It's now a free-floating island
out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
And at about 12,000 years ago or so,
there's just a little tiny bit
of this pinnacle basically
out in the Gulf of Mexico
that was sticking out of the ocean.
And then between 10 and 12,000 years ago,
it gets totally submerged,
and we have the banks of today.
So when we try to reconstruct the geology,
the geologic history,
what we have here is the estimated sea level curve
or line on the banks
of where sea level was at 11,000 years ago.
And that was a time when you had that little tiny island
sticking up out of the Gulf.
The square that you see here is the area
of the long-term monitoring program.
And the area in orange is an area
that's very, very interesting because this is an area
that we made some interesting discoveries.
And in the mid-Holocene,
underneath the reef cap in some swim-throughs,
we saw this on one of the dives.
And on this dive I was with Ernesto Weil
and Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley, and we were doing a dive
and we were just doing some species IDs.
I think we were doing random swim surveys.
We went into this little swim-through
and saw these in situ fossilized,
sub-fossil giant pieces of Acropora palmata
in growth position.
And we went in and we looked at this in close contact,
and then basically I went back to the boat after the dive.
I talked to GP and Emma and I basically said,
"I believe that there's Acropora palmata
in some of these swim-throughs.
Can I have permission to collect some?"
And they said, yes, you're granted,
through our collection permit
through the Flower Garden Banks.
I went down there, took a little rock hammer
and knocked off some of these pieces,
slabs of coral that appeared to me
to look like Acropora palmata
that I'd seen in fossil sequences in Florida.
And sure enough, we got these samples back
and sent them off for radiocarbon dating,
and we got dates back that ranged
between 10,0000 and 6,800 years.
So this basically confirmed
that the northernmost fossil reefs of Acropora
were corresponding in age with that
of the Holocene thermal maximum
of these reefs underpinning the Flower Garden Banks.
And this is a sample that we took in 2007.
And the lower part
of the sample that you see there
is a branch or a blade of Acropora palmata,
and it is covered with submarine cement and sediment
that formed while it was buried in this cave.
And those little red things
that you see dotted on the surface
is actually an encrusting foramenifera
called Homotrema rubrum.
So we were able to then reconstruct
where these corals were in time and in space
compared to the sea level curve for the Gulf of Mexico.
And what we found was that the Acropora reefs just lag
slightly behind the rate of sea level rise.
And eventually as sea level continued to rise,
they were unable to keep pace with sea level,
they became drowned in deeper water,
and then the deeper water community
of the present-day banks,
the large massive corals basically grew
on top of the former shallower water assemblage
that we saw back in the mid to early Holocene.
So a year after we made this remarkable discovery
of Acropora palmata, which really was remarkable,
and it showed that these reefs were these high energy,
shallow water reefs at 10,000 years ago,
but then through time as sea level rose,
they got deeper and deeper.
This was a dive that I was doing
and Ken Deslarzes is the person diving
in the left-hand portion of this photograph.
And this was diving right after the passage,
I believe it was, of Hurricane Ivan.
And there is what's known as a Madracis field
on the flank of the East Flower Garden Banks
down deeper than 90 feet of water,
from 90 down from there.
You can still see some
of the large massive Orbicella colonies
in this photograph as well.
But note right smack dab in the middle of the photograph
just to the right of Ken,
there's a depression, a hole that has coral rubble in it.
And my joke here is, hey Ken, you see what I see
because when we swam down into this hole
that was created, this was a blowhole created
by the hurricane in this field of Madracis,
this slate pencil coral,
yellow pencil coral,
we basically found these branches
that miraculously looked like Acropora cervicornis
that I'd seen from the Florida Keys.
So what I did was I took these samples,
I picked these samples up,
these are obviously dead colonies
that were exposed during the storm,
I stuck them in my BC pocket.
I went back to the boat and when I got back to the boat,
GP and Emma were about to go on a dive themselves,
and they basically said, "Hey, how was your dive?"
And I said, "You won't believe this,
but I think we found Acropora cervicornis
on the flank of the East Flower Garden Banks."
And GP laughed and he looked at me,
and I opened my BC pocket and I pulled it out
and I handed it to him.
And he laughed and he thought I was pulling his leg.
He thought I had picked these corals up in Florida,
put 'em in my BC, brought 'em down
and I was gonna tell him that I found these, ha ha,
after the discovery of the year before.
And I said, "No, this is not from Florida.
I'm serious. We found these corals."
And GP and Emma went on their dive
and they went to the same location.
And they were gone for a bit.
And when they came back to the boat,
Emma looked at me and her eyes were popping out of her head
and she said, "Bill, we just didn't find cervicornis,
we found a whole reef of cervicornis."
So the whole entire area where that Madracis field was
was totally underlined
by Acropora cervicornis.
And this is what it looked like when you looked
in swim-throughs and cavities on the bank.
And these are are the samples that we took
of Acropora cervicornis.
The other coral that we found, which was pretty remarkable,
is this flower coral called Eusmilia fastigiata.
And there are no known living colonies
of Eusmilia fastigiata on the Flower Garden Banks.
However, where we found the Acropora cervicornis,
we also found some that had lived there
in the geological past.
So when we dated all these things,
we came up with two different ages.
We came up with this older date for the mid-Holocene,
but much younger dates for the Acropora.
And what it appears is that during the medieval warm period,
there was about between a thousand years ago or so,
and about 200 years ago there was a warm period,
or 300 years ago there was a warm period.
And during this little tiny flicker of warm,
these cervicornis colonies lived on the flanks of the bank.
And then when it got really cold during the little ice age
where you see the arrow focused,
it got too cold for these corals
because again it got too cold for their thermal tolerances.
They all died and were covered by that Madracis field.
So basically our team wrote a paper
and we called it "Back to the future:
The history of acroporid corals at the Flower Garden Banks".
This was published in 2014
as essentially the presentation I've given you tonight.
So the conclusion, discovery of fossil Acropora
has had profound implications for our understanding
of the history of reef development
at the Flower Garden Banks.
And it puts the discovery
of the recent extant colonies found in context.
So there has been this happened before
and it's pretty, pretty exciting.
So this reconstructing the development
in light of this information shows
that there was a deepening upwards succession
from a shallow water community
that eventually lagged behind the rapidly rising sea level
of the early to middle Holocene that was eventually drowned
and subsequently capped by the present-day reef community.
And I will say to this day,
this discovery raises more questions than it answers,
but it does answer a lot of questions,
especially with regards
to local turn-on and turn-off mechanisms
of why these staghorn and elkhorn corals
basically come and go as rapidly as they do.
And does that give us any insight
into what might happen in the future?
So in summary, I'll let you read this,
but basically saying that mid-Holocene,
beautiful development of the Acropora palmata,
later in the late Holocene,
development of Acropora cervicornis, the staghorn coral,
and then the demise was at peak exposure
of the little ice age about 200 years before present
when none of those Acropora could make it through.
And the modern eurythermal coral assemblages dominated
by massive corals on the cap and Madracis on the flanks
are really something of only the last few hundred years.
Some of the head corals, maybe 500 years,
but it's a different community
than existed thousands of years ago.
So this is a picture of Jamaica
in the early, mid-1970s,
and it shows what the cap
of the Flower Garden Banks might have looked like
some 6 to say 8,000 years before present.
So what's next? Core, core, core.
The only way we can get more information
about the geological history of the banks is to get deeper
within the reef cap of the bank
and understand what lies beneath.
And this is two different coring techniques.
One is drilling method and one is a push-coring method.
But there are basically exciting things
that still need to be learned
both geologically and ecologically at the bank.
And I am dedicating this talk to the memory of Marty Heaney.
Marty was a scientist who was part of our team,
a very important part of our team
during the eight years or so we monitored the banks.
And we lost Marty a few years ago.
Thank you very much.
Kelly: Wow, thank you, Bill.
That was fantastic.
We have a few questions already lined up
but folks, if you have any more questions
in your mind right now,
please be sure to mark them down
in the question bar box
that you can find in the webinar control panel.
Type in your questions.
I have Kelly and Leslie in the background
helping me sort through them and prioritize them
so we can ask Bill a few of these as we go along.
So Bill, are you ready?
Okay, first question.
Do you think if we see continuing warming
that we will see a regrowth
of coral reefs closer to the shoreline?
Bill: Probably not, and the reason is
that the community types closer to shore
are a couple things.
One is there's too much soft sediments,
siliciclastic sediments that run off
into the Gulf of Mexico.
So it's not just a temperature thing.
But even with temperature warming,
in the shallow waters of the Gulf,
one thing we know with climate change is
while the average temperatures get warmer,
there are also more extremes to what we see.
And obviously, you guys in Texas who are on this call know
what I'm talking about because we've had these cold snaps
in southern Texas and snow and ice in areas,
and all you have to do is have one event like that
where the temperature, nearshore temperature drops
below 15 degrees C, and you essentially kill
not just the acroporid corals, but you kill all corals.
So the likelihood of shallow water reefs forming
in the shallower water areas in the northern Gulf of Mexico
is highly unlikely.
Kelly: Okay. And along with that,
we've got a couple related questions.
Do you expect staghorn and elkhorns to recolonize
at the Flower Gardens with warming seas?
Bill: As far as I haven't been out to the Flower Gardens
in a few years, and I haven't been following
any of the recent discoveries, but as far as I know,
the colonies that were found back in the 2000s
were the only colonies that have been found living to date.
But it will be interesting to see if more arrive.
And also the amount of area
on top of the Flower Garden Banks
that is monitored annually by scientists
as well as by recreational dive operations
is really small in area compared
to the total size of the banks,
of the total area of the caps of the bank.
So there's a lot of area that annually go unchecked
on the tops of the bank.
So it's really unknown how many,
because these are rare species now.
So if they came in and there were say a dozen or two dozen,
the likelihood of you seeing them on a dive
or on an outing is pretty unlikely.
So it was really fortuitous
that we found the two that we found,
'cause those happened to be right within our study plots.
Kelly: My thoughts exactly,
very fortuitous that they were in our nice study sites.
Are there any plans to try and restore these reefs
by growing these corals in the lab?
Bill: Well, there would be an ethical issue there
because right now the Flower Garden Banks
are amongst the healthiest reefs in the world.
And they are reefs that live,
the shallowest part of the reef is in 65 feet of water
and they go down deeper from there.
So the corals that we're talking about,
like with the acroporid corals,
those are really shallow water species.
So the question would be, why would we wanna bring
shallow water species into a deeper water environment?
We likely wouldn't.
However, if there was some catastrophe
that killed some of these deeper water corals
and some of these massive corals on the caps of the bank,
there are nursery facilities and outplanting things
using boulder corals today, where in the near future,
if a restoration project needed to happen,
certainly it could be done
with the nursery help
and outplanting of these boulder corals.
Kelly: Thank you. Do you believe that these corals
will be able to successfully compete with the current corals
that are already conditioned to the present-day conditions?
So I guess they're referring to the two palmatas
that are out there now.
Bill: Well, it's really interesting because if you,
and I can't go back and and show you,
but there's that one picture of the Acropora palmata,
the one that Beth found,
and it was a picture I think that was taken
by GP or Emma in 2012.
And you can actually see
how the coral is competing.
Yeah, that's the picture.
You can see how the picture,
you can see where the Acropora and another coral
are coming in contact with each other.
And while they're fighting with each other,
they're living side by side.
Exactly the person (indistinct). Thank you.
So if there's open space on a reef
and that space can be colonized, it would be interesting.
Now the thing about Acropora palmata is
it's one of the fastest growing corals in shallow water,
and in shallow water it grows so fast
that it outcompetes other corals
because it grows up above them and shades them out.
And that's really the competitive advantage
that Acropora has in shallow water
as well as being wave-resistant.
And in this case, I don't think they grow fast enough
at the Flower Garden Banks that they would outcompete corals
in a vertical direction and shade them out,
although who knows what the future will bring.
Kelly: All right, next question.
If global warming keeps melting glaciers,
then the sea level will keep rising,
which will increase the depth of the existing corals,
which means less sunlight.
Does this mean corals not only are at risk
for ocean acidification, but also from sea level rise
and cooling temperatures from the melting ice?
Bill: So if we look at the IPCC projections
for sea level rise,
which even in the worst case scenario
say, over the next few centuries is a couple meters or so,
a meter and a half or so in a couple hundred years,
if that occurs, if you think about the Flower Garden Banks,
if you're a coral and you're living in 65 feet of water
and sea level rises a meter,
now all of a sudden you're in, instead of 65 feet of water,
you're in 68 feet of water.
So to a deep water coral, that three feet
really doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
However, if you're a shallow water coral living
on some Caribbean island,
and you live very close to sea level
and you're living, say in a zone
that is currently less than two meters
and all of a sudden you drop sea level or rise sea level,
excuse me, by a meter or a meter and a half,
now instead of being in five feet of water,
you're in nine feet of water,
that could make a big difference.
So it really depends on the reef and where you are.
But sea level rise in the future
will have very little effect, I believe,
on the reefs of the Flower Gardens.
What we have to be mindful of in the Flower Gardens
is ever-increasing sea surface temperatures,
increased bleaching events,
more bleaching events.
And bleaching events due to warm water stresses the coral.
And when corals get stressed,
their immune systems become compromised
and then they become more susceptible to disease.
So that would be my greatest fear for the future
would be the temperature that is seen on an annual basis,
not just in the summer, but annual basis in the banks
and what the long-term prognosis for reef health would be
related to temperature, not sea level rise.
Kelly: Okay, I've got a little bit different one
for you this time, Bill.
We have Greg Boland on the line and he says
maybe you should relate the funny story
about the cervicornis found tied to a coral head
at the Flower Garden Banks in 1979.
Bill: I can relate to this story,
and Greg actually, I believe,
is in possession of those colonies.
There was a group of geologists and biologists who worked
for the United States Geological Survey in Florida.
And one summer they took a bunch
of Acropora cervicornis from Florida,
kept it in live bubbler systems on their boat,
and they took a boat trip from the Florida Keys
to the Flower Garden Banks
and lived out on the Flower Garden Banks for a week or two.
And when they were out there,
they outplanted Acropora cervicornis to the reef
and also to some of the legs of the oil and gas platforms
because they wanted to see
if they planted Acropora cervicornis there,
whether or not they would live through the wintertime.
So they were gonna go back the next summer
and see what happened to them.
And when this group from, I believe it was Texas A&M
and the Texas Sea Grant,
and I believe the charge was led by Tom Bright,
and Greg Boland was part of that effort,
they heard about this and they went out
and they retrieved all of those corals
that were taken in from Florida
and removed them from the reef.
And that experiment was shot in the leg before it started.
Kelly: Kind of funny, but yeah,
we have to be really careful
about not moving things from one location to another
without anticipating the consequences.
Bill: Now again, we have to remember when this was done,
this was done in the mid, early 1970s, I believe,
maybe late '70s, but it was done a long time ago.
And it was before people even gave consideration
to what the different genotypes
and moving species around from one place to another.
And at the time this would've been the introduction
of an exotic species, right?
Because it did not currently exist there
and it was brought in from another place.
So yeah, it is something we need to be mindful of.
Kelly: Okay, we have time for one more question
before we wrap up this evening.
And we'll take one from last week's speaker, Steve Gittings.
What would you guess the Flower Garden Banks
will look like in 100 years?
Bill: In 100 years, I hope they look
exactly the way they do today.
My fear is that through global warming,
increased temperature, increased bleaching events,
increased disease events,
we'll see a community similar to that of today,
but with lower coral cover, which would be catastrophic.
It would be devastating.
It would bring a tear to my eye.
And it is possible that that is happening and might occur.
And with the projection of sea surface temperatures globally
over the next hundred years,
there's a good chance that that will happen.
However, there are no guarantees.
And one of the things about the Flower Garden Banks,
because they're 110 miles offshore,
because they are far from humans,
because they're in deeper water, they do have the chance
of potentially being resilient
and resistant to these events
because of their protections by depth and so on.
So hopefully we won't see what's happened
in the rest of the Caribbean.
But my gut feeling is that the Flower Garden Banks
100 years from now will look very similar
to the way they do today,
but with lower coral cover than we see today.
My hope is that they won't change at all.
Kelly: I think all the staff
would agree with you on that one.
Well, thank you Bill.
If you'll hold on for just a second, folks,
it's time for us to wrap up the presentation this evening.
Thank you for attending.
And thank you for attending this presentation
on Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks
from the Inside Out.
This is the second in our series
of four presentations that we are offering this month.
Please be sure to sign up for the remaining presentations
on February 15th and February 22nd.
Next week we'll be hearing
about the early days of exploration
in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico from Tom Bright,
the father of the Flower Garden Banks.
And in that one photo, he's the person of interest
in that black and white photo.
And then the final week, we'll take a look
at current research and what it can tell us
about organisms in the deeper, less explored part
of our sanctuary, the mesophotic zone.
And this is where something like eDNA comes in.
So if you're curious what that is and wanna know more,
definitely check in with us on the 22nd.
Depending on the number of questions remaining,
we will attempt to get them answered after the webinar ends
and then email out responses.
I see there's just a few, a handful left, Bill,
so I may be in touch with you to help answer them.
If you would like to learn more on your own,
we have provided a document full of resource links
in the handout pane, as I mentioned
at the start of the presentation.
If you haven't yet downloaded it,
now would be a great time to do that.
And as always, we welcome your feedback and questions.
You can submit input by replying
to the follow-up email you'll receive after the webinar
or by emailing us at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
Today's presentation has also been part
of the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series.
While Seaside Chats last just one month each year,
our national webinar series continues throughout the year
to provide you with educational and scientific expertise,
resources and training
to support ocean and climate literacy.
Be sure to check the website for recordings
of past webinars including these,
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Following this webinar, attendees will receive a PDF copy
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Please complete the survey
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It should only take about three minutes to complete,
and we really appreciate any feedback
you are willing to share.
Thanks again to Bill Precht for a great presentation
about Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks
from the Inside Out.
Bill, it was a pleasure to have you
as our presenter this evening.
And thanks. Oops.
Sorry, I have you muted, Bill.
Did you wanna say any last minute words to everyone?
Bill: I just wanted to thank everybody
who attended for attending,
and it was for me this amazing ride down memory lane
of some of the best dive days I've had in my life
with some of my closest friends.
And these are days that I cherish and will never forget.
Kelly: Thanks so much, Bill.
And thanks to all of you for taking the time to join us.
This concludes today's webinar.