WEBVTT
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Good evening. We're pleased to have you join us
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for our annual Seaside Chat speaker series
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about ocean topics associated
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with Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
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and the Gulf of Mexico.
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We're also part
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of the National Marine Sanctuary Webinar series
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and the NOAA Science Seminar series.
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During the presentation,
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all attendees will be in listen only mode.
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You are welcome to type questions for the presenter
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into the question box at the bottom of the control panel
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on the right side of your screen.
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You may also let us know about any technical issues
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you are having by typing in there,
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and we will be monitoring the incoming questions
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and technical issues and we'll respond to them
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as soon as possible.
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We are recording this session and we'll post the recording
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to the National Marine Sanctuaries
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and Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary websites.
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We will notify registered participants via email
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when these recordings are available.
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And for those of you who are interested,
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we have a document of links
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to additional resources on today's topic.
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In the handouts pane of the control panel,
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you simply click on the item to download it.
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Hello, everyone. My name is Kelly Drinnen
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and I'm the Education Outreach Specialist
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for Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
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I'll be facilitating today's webinar from Dickinson, Texas.
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Also with me today are Kelly O'Connell
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and Leslie Whaylen Clift, other staff members
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who will be helping me
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with the backend administration of this webinar.
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In 1972, the United States ushered
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in a new era of ocean conservation
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by creating the National Marine Sanctuary system.
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Since then, we've grown into a nationwide network
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of 15 national marine sanctuaries
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and 2 marine national monuments
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that conserve more than 620,000 square miles
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of spectacular ocean and Great Lakes waters.
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It's an area nearly the size of Alaska.
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These marine protected areas
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are kind of like national parks, but underwater.
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The National Marine Sanctuaries Act gives NOAA the authority
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to designate special areas of the marine environment
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as national marine sanctuaries.
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It also mandates
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that the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
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conduct research, monitoring,
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resource protection, education, outreach and management
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of America's underwater treasures
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to preserve them for future generations.
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In addition to being places for recreation and research,
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national marine sanctuaries are also living classrooms
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where people can see, touch, and learn
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about the nation's Great Lakes and ocean treasures.
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This webinar series is just one part
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of that national education and outreach effort.
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The Seaside Chat series is hosted
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by Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary,
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the only national marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.
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This sanctuary consists of 17 banks,
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or small underwater mountains, that are home
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to some of the healthiest coral reefs in the world,
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amazing algal and sponge communities, and deep reef habitats
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featuring an abundance of black coral and gorgonians.
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We invite you to learn more about us
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by visiting the sanctuary website at flowergarden.noaa.gov.
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Today's presentation focuses on hidden clues
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about the history and future
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of the Flower Garden Bank's coral reefs.
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In 2006 and '07,
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while conducting annual long-term monitoring activities
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at the Flower Garden Banks,
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researchers discovered remnants of a fossil reef comprised
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of elkhorn and staghorn corals,
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which are species almost non-existent on our reefs today.
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This discovery has dramatically altered our understanding
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of reef development at the Flower Garden Banks
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and the response of coral communities
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to changing climate through time.
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This evening, Bill Precht will take us back in time
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to help us understand our coral reefs from the inside out.
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William Precht is both a geologist and ecologist by training
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and has been working on tropical ecosystem since 1978.
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Since completing his graduate degree
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from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School
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of Marine and Atmospheric Science,
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Mr. Precht has specialized in the assessment, monitoring,
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restoration and rehabilitation of various coastal resources,
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especially coral reef, seagrass, and mangrove systems.
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His contributions to the professional and academic community
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are nationally and internationally recognized,
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particularly regarding coral reef ecology and paleoecology,
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disturbance ecology, carbonate sedimentology,
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historical ecology, and the application
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of ecological principles to coastal restoration.
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Bill's work draws
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upon significant state-of-the-art research experience,
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excuse me, and field studies and theoretical analysis.
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Since 2012, Mr. Precht has served as the Director
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of Marine and Coastal Programs
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with the environmental consulting firm
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Dial Cordy and Associates Incorporated in Miami, Florida.
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Prior to joining DCA, he worked for NOAA
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in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary,
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where he was the manager and team lead
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of the damage assessment, restoration
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and resource protection program
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where his work was focused on protecting,
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conserving and restoring marine
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and coastal resources throughout the Florida Keys.
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From 2002 to 2008, he served
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as the Chief Scientist on a joint contract
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with the Minerals Management Service and NOAA,
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performing the long-term reef monitoring
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at Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
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in the Gulf of Mexico.
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And I believe it's that experience
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he'll be drawing on this evening. Welcome, Bill.
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Good evening, everyone.
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Thank you very much, Kelly,
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for that warm and wonderful introduction.
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And I can't wait to talk about this presentation
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because this exactly was done
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when I was on that contract
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with Minerals Management Service, now BOEM,
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and the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary.
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And I'm gonna go right to the slides
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because I've got a lot to show you
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and lots to talk about today.
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All right, looks good.
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Take it away.
Okay.
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I don't see my slides for some reason.
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Okay.
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Oh, there it's, I got it, I got it, I got it.
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Okay. So the title of this talk is
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Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks from the Inside Out.
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And when we were studying the Flower Garden Banks
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doing our annual monitoring,
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we serendipitously ran into a few wonderful discoveries,
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and it's those discoveries that were really outside the fold
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of really what our tasks were.
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But I say that in small part because our tasks were
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to really enhance the science understanding,
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the scientific understanding of the Flower Garden Banks.
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And through this annual monitoring program,
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we had, on any given trip, 20 scientists on the boat,
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which included our team of scientific divers
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that were doing the monitoring.
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But we also would invite visiting scientists.
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Whenever we would have bunk space available
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on the liveaboard vessel,
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we would invite these scientists.
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And it was often through these visiting scientists
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that many of these wonderful discoveries were made.
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And last week, Steve Gittings gave a presentation
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and he called it the best job ever.
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And I would say in my 35 plus year career
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as a coral reef scientist,
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that contract with the Flower Garden Banks
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was the best job I ever had.
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And part of the reason for that was
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because I got to share the work
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with two of my best friends
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and two of the best coral reef ecologists in the world,
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Dr. Rich Aronson and Dr. Ken Deslarzes.
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And we basically put a team together
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and we were co-PIs on that contract.
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And it was basically the three of us
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putting our heads together
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and this is what a lot of the work came out of.
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So I can't take credit for this.
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This has to be shared with my co-PIs.
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There's special thanks that also needs to be given
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to a bunch of people from Flower Garden Banks at the time,
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Emma Hickerson, GP Schmahl, Marissa Nuttall.
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There was also James Sinclair and Greg Boland from BOEM.
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Bill.
Beth Zimmer, yes.
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Sorry to interrupt.
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We're getting some garbled audio,
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which may be a bandwidth issue from where you are.
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So I think I'm gonna ask you to turn off your camera
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just so that we can hear you better.
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Okay. I'll do that.
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In the control panel right below the microphone
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is a little camera symbol.
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And just click it off.
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I don't see it on my.
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All right. Oh, I can turn it off
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at this end, I think.
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Okay. Yeah, that'd be great. Sorry.
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All right. Got it.
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Yeah, 'cause I don't need it anymore.
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That's great. Thank you.
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Sorry about that.
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So again, I just wanted to thank
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all these people on the list.
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Dr. Les Kaufman, who's listed here, by the way,
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in year two of the contract,
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he became the fourth co-PI with our team.
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And we brought him in specifically
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because he's a world-renowned fish specialist,
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and fish ecologist and coral reef ecologist.
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So he was a strong addition to our team.
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So as everybody knows, the Flower Garden Banks sit
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110 miles or so offshore in the Gulf of Mexico,
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and they are situated on salt domes.
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And they are these spectacular features
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that come up from the bottom of the Gulf,
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the floor of the Gulf.
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And when they come into shallow enough water,
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they have these really remarkable benthic communities
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that live on their surface.
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So again, they're perched atop salt domes.
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They're the northernmost coral reefs
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in the continental United States.
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They're formed in most part by very large stony corals.
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Acroporid corals, the elkhorn and staghorn corals,
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historically were absent from the banks.
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So from the time that people started studying
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the Flower Garden Banks,
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no acroporid corals had ever been seen
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in either the sediment and/or living on the surface.
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Another big feature about the Flower Garden Banks,
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and as Kelly pointed out before,
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is they're some of the most remarkable reefs
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even today on the planet
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in that they have greater than 50% live coral cover.
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There are some 23 known coral species
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that live on the top of the banks
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and hundreds of other reef invertebrate species,
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250 or so fish species and so on.
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So today I'm gonna focus most of my presentation
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on discoveries that we made at the East Flower Garden Banks,
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but we also made some of these discoveries at the West Bank,
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but specifically the East Bank was the place
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where we did most of our discovery.
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And this graphic,
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this beautiful cartoon on the left
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was from the original classic publication
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on the Flower Garden Banks
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that was written by Rezak, Bright and McGrail.
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What you see there is the top far left
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is the top of the bank showing these very large head corals
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and massive boulder corals.
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And then there's a shoulder that goes down
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and it flattens off and then it goes down
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to the deep depths below the photic zone.
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As I pointed out before, Caribbean acroporids,
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specifically elkhorn and staghorn coral,
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were never present at the Flower Garden Banks.
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And the reason why I'm pointing this out is
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because this was one of the amazing discoveries that we had.
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And I'll talk about that.
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And when we were doing our studies,
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our monitoring studies,
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Rich Aronson wrote this paper in 2005
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and he pointed out the fact
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that one of the reasons why the Flower Gardens
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still had so much oral cover
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was because they didn't have acroporids.
267
00:12:52.778 --> 00:12:57.420
And these branching acroporid corals Caribbean-wide
268
00:12:57.420 --> 00:13:01.920
had seen this catastrophic disease run through
269
00:13:01.920 --> 00:13:06.413
starting in the mid 1970s through the early 1990s.
270
00:13:07.260 --> 00:13:09.750
And it decimated coral reefs
271
00:13:09.750 --> 00:13:11.610
throughout Florida and the Caribbean
272
00:13:11.610 --> 00:13:14.430
with losses of some 90 plus percent
273
00:13:14.430 --> 00:13:17.910
of all the branching acroporid species Caribbean-wide.
274
00:13:17.910 --> 00:13:20.793
Well, if you don't have those corals to lose,
275
00:13:21.960 --> 00:13:23.340
you don't lose them.
276
00:13:23.340 --> 00:13:28.230
So a lot of the original catastrophic losses that were seen
277
00:13:28.230 --> 00:13:31.140
on Caribbean reefs and Florida reefs were due
278
00:13:31.140 --> 00:13:33.240
to the loss of those two species.
279
00:13:33.240 --> 00:13:36.360
However, we didn't have them on the Flower Garden Banks.
280
00:13:36.360 --> 00:13:40.410
So because of that, the Flower Garden Banks were blind
281
00:13:40.410 --> 00:13:43.140
to the rest of what was going on in the Caribbean.
282
00:13:43.140 --> 00:13:46.773
And because of that, they really,
283
00:13:47.640 --> 00:13:50.880
the banks themselves with all these other corals persisted
284
00:13:50.880 --> 00:13:53.130
in this very, very high coral cover.
285
00:13:53.130 --> 00:13:57.990
And the reason why it was postulated that Acropora species
286
00:13:57.990 --> 00:14:00.630
had been absent at the Flower Gardens was
287
00:14:00.630 --> 00:14:05.630
that the water temperature historically had been too cold
288
00:14:05.790 --> 00:14:06.870
during the winter months.
289
00:14:06.870 --> 00:14:08.910
And there were many presentations
290
00:14:08.910 --> 00:14:10.923
and publications that described that.
291
00:14:12.570 --> 00:14:16.320
So as we know, today we're in a warming world.
292
00:14:16.320 --> 00:14:21.240
And a lot of projections had been made early on.
293
00:14:21.240 --> 00:14:24.830
And this one is a figure from Dr. Joan Kleypas
294
00:14:24.830 --> 00:14:27.510
as showing what would happen
295
00:14:27.510 --> 00:14:31.470
if the sea water temperatures
296
00:14:31.470 --> 00:14:34.110
around the world got warmer.
297
00:14:34.110 --> 00:14:37.170
And what you would see is you would see an expansion
298
00:14:37.170 --> 00:14:41.250
of reef development at the margins of reef growth,
299
00:14:41.250 --> 00:14:45.570
which is the approximate 18 degrees C isotherm.
300
00:14:45.570 --> 00:14:48.450
And if you notice where America is,
301
00:14:48.450 --> 00:14:50.790
North America is on this map,
302
00:14:50.790 --> 00:14:53.670
you see that dot in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
303
00:14:53.670 --> 00:14:55.560
right where that orange bar is.
304
00:14:55.560 --> 00:14:58.953
And that is going right through the Flower Garden Banks.
305
00:15:00.240 --> 00:15:02.580
So one of the things we know
306
00:15:02.580 --> 00:15:07.580
about the biological response of climate change has been
307
00:15:07.620 --> 00:15:11.760
that organisms change their migration patterns,
308
00:15:11.760 --> 00:15:15.000
their phenologies and their ranges
309
00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:18.690
by responding to these warmer temperatures.
310
00:15:18.690 --> 00:15:23.070
And the range shifts that we've been seeing have been
311
00:15:23.070 --> 00:15:27.450
for the most part moving towards the poles.
312
00:15:27.450 --> 00:15:30.000
And if you're in a mountain setting,
313
00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:33.030
it's actually migrating up into higher
314
00:15:33.030 --> 00:15:34.710
and higher alpine settings.
315
00:15:34.710 --> 00:15:39.710
So the biological response of organisms to global warming
316
00:15:39.720 --> 00:15:43.380
has been that warmer species are now being found
317
00:15:43.380 --> 00:15:46.110
in areas that they weren't found before,
318
00:15:46.110 --> 00:15:49.773
that where traditionally only colder species were found.
319
00:15:51.180 --> 00:15:54.780
So going back to the map of the Caribbean,
320
00:15:54.780 --> 00:15:59.670
this is a map that shows the number of genera, not species,
321
00:15:59.670 --> 00:16:03.270
but genera of coral that live within the Caribbean.
322
00:16:03.270 --> 00:16:07.530
And the area within the yellow is the area
323
00:16:07.530 --> 00:16:10.740
that had acroporid corals.
324
00:16:10.740 --> 00:16:12.570
And notice there are two areas
325
00:16:12.570 --> 00:16:16.170
that are highlighted in orange, the Flower Garden Banks
326
00:16:16.170 --> 00:16:20.790
and the southeast coast of Florida,
327
00:16:20.790 --> 00:16:22.980
but north of the Florida Keys.
328
00:16:22.980 --> 00:16:27.360
That basically was an area that was rife
329
00:16:27.360 --> 00:16:31.430
for the origin and acceptance basically
330
00:16:31.430 --> 00:16:35.490
of these potential range shift species,
331
00:16:35.490 --> 00:16:37.140
which includes corals.
332
00:16:37.140 --> 00:16:41.640
And in fact, acroporid corals started to move
333
00:16:41.640 --> 00:16:44.040
up the east coast of Florida.
334
00:16:44.040 --> 00:16:47.920
And myself and Rich Aronson wrote a paper
335
00:16:49.080 --> 00:16:50.430
back in the early 2000s
336
00:16:50.430 --> 00:16:53.910
called "Climate flickers and range shifts of corals".
337
00:16:53.910 --> 00:16:58.230
And basically what we talked about in that manuscript was
338
00:16:58.230 --> 00:17:03.210
that there was this movement of corals north
339
00:17:03.210 --> 00:17:05.400
of their previously known range.
340
00:17:05.400 --> 00:17:07.590
So the green on this map
341
00:17:07.590 --> 00:17:10.170
is the present day Florida reef track,
342
00:17:10.170 --> 00:17:13.230
which extends from just south of Miami,
343
00:17:13.230 --> 00:17:16.680
about Fowey Rocks lighthouse and Biscayne National Park
344
00:17:16.680 --> 00:17:20.370
down through the Florida Keys and out to the Dry Tortugas.
345
00:17:20.370 --> 00:17:25.370
The area in orange was an area that there are fossil reefs
346
00:17:25.380 --> 00:17:28.950
and they extend north up to Palm Beach County.
347
00:17:28.950 --> 00:17:33.720
But the area of orange, there were very, very, very few
348
00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:38.070
if ever a Acropora species found.
349
00:17:38.070 --> 00:17:41.490
And in the late '90s, early 2000s,
350
00:17:41.490 --> 00:17:44.040
all of a sudden there were discoveries
351
00:17:44.040 --> 00:17:48.540
of these large thickets of Acropora cervicornis
352
00:17:48.540 --> 00:17:50.223
off of Fort Lauderdale.
353
00:17:51.270 --> 00:17:53.760
And this is some 25 kilometers north
354
00:17:53.760 --> 00:17:57.420
of their previously known main range.
355
00:17:57.420 --> 00:18:00.268
Now it wasn't to say that there weren't one-offs there,
356
00:18:00.268 --> 00:18:05.040
but these large thickets had never been described before.
357
00:18:05.040 --> 00:18:09.034
And in addition, we also found Acropora palmata.
358
00:18:09.034 --> 00:18:12.840
And this was a palmata that I photographed in 2003
359
00:18:12.840 --> 00:18:14.220
off of Pompano Beach Pier,
360
00:18:14.220 --> 00:18:15.990
which is in Northern Broward County,
361
00:18:15.990 --> 00:18:17.840
which is almost in Palm Beach County.
362
00:18:18.750 --> 00:18:22.380
So it's a pretty amazing discovery.
363
00:18:22.380 --> 00:18:24.570
And a few others have been found
364
00:18:24.570 --> 00:18:27.063
throughout the waters of Broward County since.
365
00:18:28.380 --> 00:18:32.610
And these were the first known poleward examples
366
00:18:32.610 --> 00:18:36.720
of expansion of a Caribbean coral genus.
367
00:18:36.720 --> 00:18:40.350
And as I mentioned, based upon these other papers
368
00:18:40.350 --> 00:18:42.810
that described what the response would be,
369
00:18:42.810 --> 00:18:47.810
this is most parsimoniously explained as being shifted
370
00:18:48.150 --> 00:18:50.790
due to recent patterns of warming.
371
00:18:50.790 --> 00:18:52.950
Interesting at the same time,
372
00:18:52.950 --> 00:18:55.530
there were a whole bunch of new species that were appearing
373
00:18:55.530 --> 00:18:57.330
at the Flower Garden Banks,
374
00:18:57.330 --> 00:19:00.300
which included Tubastraea coccinea
375
00:19:00.300 --> 00:19:03.953
which is an exotic ahermatypic coral species,
376
00:19:03.953 --> 00:19:08.010
Dichocoenia stokesi, which was found by Emma Hickerson
377
00:19:08.010 --> 00:19:12.480
and the team on the East Bank in 2005 and '06.
378
00:19:12.480 --> 00:19:15.960
Nassau grouper had been described in 2006.
379
00:19:15.960 --> 00:19:18.030
And a person on our team,
380
00:19:18.030 --> 00:19:20.010
a woman by the name of Beth Zimmer,
381
00:19:20.010 --> 00:19:23.580
she described some colonies of Acropora palmata.
382
00:19:23.580 --> 00:19:26.700
And this was written up in "Coral Reefs" back in 2005.
383
00:19:27.600 --> 00:19:31.890
And the first discovery of Acropora palmata
384
00:19:31.890 --> 00:19:33.540
was actually made on the West Bank
385
00:19:33.540 --> 00:19:35.910
and it's the figure in the upper left.
386
00:19:35.910 --> 00:19:39.000
And this is a colony of Acropora palmata
387
00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:41.190
that was first found by Sarah Bernhardt
388
00:19:41.190 --> 00:19:44.190
who was working for the Flower Garden Sanctuary at the time.
389
00:19:45.057 --> 00:19:49.650
And the picture below taken by Emma Hickerson
390
00:19:49.650 --> 00:19:54.180
back around 2011, 2012, is a photograph of the colony
391
00:19:54.180 --> 00:19:59.180
that Beth found when we were doing the long-term monitoring.
392
00:19:59.580 --> 00:20:01.800
So the question is
393
00:20:01.800 --> 00:20:04.740
how do these corals,
394
00:20:04.740 --> 00:20:06.870
I mean, we understand that they get there
395
00:20:06.870 --> 00:20:08.100
and they live there now
396
00:20:08.100 --> 00:20:10.440
because it's slightly warmer than it was in the past.
397
00:20:10.440 --> 00:20:13.650
At least that's the possible explanation.
398
00:20:13.650 --> 00:20:15.600
But how do they get there?
399
00:20:15.600 --> 00:20:19.410
And this is a picture of Beth's colony in Summer 2002.
400
00:20:19.410 --> 00:20:22.710
I understand since it's gone through some ups and downs
401
00:20:22.710 --> 00:20:25.680
due to some storms and some other effects.
402
00:20:25.680 --> 00:20:29.350
But how do Acropora palmata
403
00:20:30.720 --> 00:20:32.730
get to the Flower Garden Banks
404
00:20:32.730 --> 00:20:35.970
when there are no reefs that are even close?
405
00:20:35.970 --> 00:20:39.810
And the way palmata reproduces sexually is
406
00:20:39.810 --> 00:20:42.780
it broadcasts its gametes, its eggs and its sperm
407
00:20:42.780 --> 00:20:44.970
into the water column once a year,
408
00:20:44.970 --> 00:20:47.490
generally after the August full moon.
409
00:20:47.490 --> 00:20:51.000
And they basically fertilize in the water
410
00:20:51.000 --> 00:20:53.010
and they're carried by currents.
411
00:20:53.010 --> 00:20:55.410
And then they eventually settle out
412
00:20:55.410 --> 00:20:56.850
and they'll land on a reef
413
00:20:56.850 --> 00:20:59.763
and they'll basically colonize that reef.
414
00:21:01.500 --> 00:21:05.550
Usually the pelagic larvae become competent to settle
415
00:21:05.550 --> 00:21:08.040
within five days of fertilization,
416
00:21:08.040 --> 00:21:11.220
but they can remain planktonic for up to 20 days.
417
00:21:11.220 --> 00:21:12.540
And this is from a study
418
00:21:12.540 --> 00:21:15.063
from Iliana Baums published in 2005.
419
00:21:18.540 --> 00:21:20.100
Alexis Lugo-Fernandez
420
00:21:20.100 --> 00:21:23.790
of, at the time, Minerals Management Service basically
421
00:21:23.790 --> 00:21:25.080
tried to do a reconstruction.
422
00:21:25.080 --> 00:21:26.700
He was a physical oceanographer,
423
00:21:26.700 --> 00:21:30.300
tried to do a reconstruction of how do you get things
424
00:21:30.300 --> 00:21:32.550
to the Flower Garden Banks based
425
00:21:32.550 --> 00:21:33.900
on all the different currents
426
00:21:33.900 --> 00:21:37.230
that are in the Gulf of Mexico and the closest reefs.
427
00:21:37.230 --> 00:21:39.720
How do you get Acropora there?
428
00:21:39.720 --> 00:21:43.350
And basically, like Iliana said it,
429
00:21:43.350 --> 00:21:48.350
the larvae stay available for 20 days.
430
00:21:48.960 --> 00:21:50.553
But according to Alexis,
431
00:21:51.963 --> 00:21:56.963
it took 55 to 135 days to get to the Flower Garden Banks
432
00:21:58.170 --> 00:22:00.060
based on his different methods
433
00:22:00.060 --> 00:22:04.230
and different circulation patterns and routes to get there.
434
00:22:04.230 --> 00:22:06.900
So it seemed unlikely that this could happen.
435
00:22:06.900 --> 00:22:10.847
So one of the things that happened during our monitoring was
436
00:22:10.847 --> 00:22:15.720
we had this amazing hurricane.
437
00:22:15.720 --> 00:22:19.800
And it was Hurricane Rita that went right over the bank
438
00:22:19.800 --> 00:22:23.280
and it went over during spawning season.
439
00:22:23.280 --> 00:22:26.580
And it also shows the direction of the loop current,
440
00:22:26.580 --> 00:22:29.070
and the loop currents that sit over the bank.
441
00:22:29.070 --> 00:22:33.300
And based on some projections that were made
442
00:22:33.300 --> 00:22:38.040
that basically the larvae can actually suck on the tail
443
00:22:38.040 --> 00:22:40.890
of that hurricane and be dragged along
444
00:22:40.890 --> 00:22:43.590
and can actually make it there in less than the 20 days.
445
00:22:43.590 --> 00:22:45.780
So there are ways to get them there.
446
00:22:45.780 --> 00:22:48.363
And this one is kind of a crazy,
447
00:22:49.200 --> 00:22:53.820
hang on to the back end of a hurricane to get there.
448
00:22:53.820 --> 00:22:57.360
But using this observation
449
00:22:57.360 --> 00:23:00.870
of this Acropora discovery
450
00:23:00.870 --> 00:23:03.123
that we made during our monitoring,
451
00:23:05.430 --> 00:23:08.250
we thought, well, if we go back
452
00:23:08.250 --> 00:23:10.860
to the Holocene thermal optimum,
453
00:23:10.860 --> 00:23:13.950
which was between 10 and 6,000 years ago,
454
00:23:13.950 --> 00:23:15.630
there was evidence from both terrestrial
455
00:23:15.630 --> 00:23:19.560
and coastal environments that there were similar movements
456
00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:22.830
of organisms both north when it got warmer
457
00:23:22.830 --> 00:23:26.490
and then retracted south when it got colder.
458
00:23:26.490 --> 00:23:31.490
And this is looking at Holocene temperature variation.
459
00:23:31.650 --> 00:23:33.030
So this is temperature
460
00:23:33.030 --> 00:23:36.270
over the last 12,000 years of Earth history.
461
00:23:36.270 --> 00:23:38.700
And you see that there's a period of time
462
00:23:38.700 --> 00:23:43.350
between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago or so
463
00:23:43.350 --> 00:23:47.040
where temperatures were on average warmer
464
00:23:47.040 --> 00:23:50.340
than they were up until about 1970.
465
00:23:50.340 --> 00:23:55.200
And today they're basically now exceeding those temperatures
466
00:23:55.200 --> 00:23:56.850
of the mid-Holocene.
467
00:23:56.850 --> 00:24:01.710
And the black line that you see is the smoothed average
468
00:24:01.710 --> 00:24:03.480
of all the different curves.
469
00:24:03.480 --> 00:24:06.930
And you can see again how the current straight line
470
00:24:06.930 --> 00:24:10.560
up on the far right of the figure
471
00:24:10.560 --> 00:24:13.020
is in excess of the mid-Holocene warm.
472
00:24:13.020 --> 00:24:15.240
But there was a time in the mid-Holocene,
473
00:24:15.240 --> 00:24:17.610
again when temperatures were warmer
474
00:24:17.610 --> 00:24:19.560
than the historical known average
475
00:24:19.560 --> 00:24:21.540
for the Flower Garden Banks.
476
00:24:21.540 --> 00:24:25.830
So like I said, we know that during the mid-Holocene
477
00:24:25.830 --> 00:24:28.440
there were these poleward shifts of species,
478
00:24:28.440 --> 00:24:33.270
which included the boreal mollusks found in Greenland
479
00:24:33.270 --> 00:24:36.390
that before were only found
480
00:24:36.390 --> 00:24:40.260
in the maritime provinces
481
00:24:40.260 --> 00:24:45.210
of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada.
482
00:24:45.210 --> 00:24:47.910
And there were also warm water oysters and scallops found
483
00:24:47.910 --> 00:24:49.233
off of Sable Island.
484
00:24:50.970 --> 00:24:54.700
And in coral reefs studied by Charlie Veron
485
00:24:55.920 --> 00:24:59.880
in Japan showed that the mid-Holocene climate flicker
486
00:24:59.880 --> 00:25:02.820
also correlated with the northernmost expansion
487
00:25:02.820 --> 00:25:04.620
of coral reefs in the Caribbean.
488
00:25:04.620 --> 00:25:06.720
So I don't wanna dwell on this too much,
489
00:25:06.720 --> 00:25:09.060
but basically this period of time
490
00:25:09.060 --> 00:25:11.640
during the Holocene optimum was a time
491
00:25:11.640 --> 00:25:14.940
when it was really beautiful for reef development.
492
00:25:14.940 --> 00:25:18.090
So using that idea and then thinking
493
00:25:18.090 --> 00:25:20.280
about what happened in Florida
494
00:25:20.280 --> 00:25:25.280
at the same time it's going on in the Flower Gardens,
495
00:25:25.440 --> 00:25:29.730
but also knowing that in Florida we had these fossil reefs
496
00:25:29.730 --> 00:25:34.410
that underpinned the reef from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale.
497
00:25:34.410 --> 00:25:38.310
And when we studied these reefs off of Florida,
498
00:25:38.310 --> 00:25:42.090
we found that between 10 and 6,000 years ago,
499
00:25:42.090 --> 00:25:44.910
there were these amazing reefs
500
00:25:44.910 --> 00:25:49.230
that extended some 550 kilometers north
501
00:25:49.230 --> 00:25:50.910
of their known historic range.
502
00:25:50.910 --> 00:25:54.720
And these were massive, beautiful barrier reefs
503
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:57.330
that formed on the east coast of Florida
504
00:25:57.330 --> 00:25:59.697
some 10 to 6,000 years ago.
505
00:25:59.697 --> 00:26:04.697
And they were dominated by elkhorn and staghorn corals.
506
00:26:07.710 --> 00:26:12.090
This formation or accumulation of these thick deposits,
507
00:26:12.090 --> 00:26:15.660
these are sub-fossil and fossilized branches,
508
00:26:15.660 --> 00:26:20.340
giant branches of Acropora palmata living at a reef crest.
509
00:26:20.340 --> 00:26:22.470
And these were found again north
510
00:26:22.470 --> 00:26:25.050
of where they currently exist in Florida
511
00:26:25.050 --> 00:26:28.530
and up to 150 kilometers north of their present range.
512
00:26:28.530 --> 00:26:32.190
So we postulated that this implies
513
00:26:32.190 --> 00:26:34.590
that these Acropora species are capable
514
00:26:34.590 --> 00:26:38.100
of responding very rapidly to climate change
515
00:26:38.100 --> 00:26:39.270
through range expansions
516
00:26:39.270 --> 00:26:42.150
and then possibly contractions in the past.
517
00:26:42.150 --> 00:26:46.770
And what we did was a whole bunch of authors from the USGS,
518
00:26:46.770 --> 00:26:49.563
Lauren Toth, Alex Modys,
519
00:26:51.810 --> 00:26:53.880
Rich Aronson was involved in the study,
520
00:26:53.880 --> 00:26:58.140
we looked at the expansion
521
00:26:58.140 --> 00:27:01.560
of when these things occurred and how far they went north.
522
00:27:01.560 --> 00:27:05.070
And you can see on this map that there's a yellow line.
523
00:27:05.070 --> 00:27:09.930
And that yellow line is the maximum extent of reef building
524
00:27:09.930 --> 00:27:12.120
during the mid-Holocene thermal optimum.
525
00:27:12.120 --> 00:27:15.000
And then in the late Holocene, as temperatures got cooler,
526
00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:17.370
these reefs contracted further south
527
00:27:17.370 --> 00:27:20.100
and then they were found only in that orange area.
528
00:27:20.100 --> 00:27:23.670
And then after the little ice age couple hundred years ago,
529
00:27:23.670 --> 00:27:26.670
they basically contracted south to Fowey Rocks,
530
00:27:26.670 --> 00:27:29.493
which is again approximately equivalent with Miami.
531
00:27:31.200 --> 00:27:34.110
So using this known latitude and expansion
532
00:27:34.110 --> 00:27:37.650
of fossil reefs in the early middle Holocene
533
00:27:37.650 --> 00:27:41.250
with what was going on in Florida,
534
00:27:41.250 --> 00:27:44.400
and then the known discovery of recent Acropora
535
00:27:44.400 --> 00:27:46.440
at the Flower Garden Banks,
536
00:27:46.440 --> 00:27:49.110
and then also reconstructing the sea level history
537
00:27:49.110 --> 00:27:52.200
of the Flower Garden Banks, we had a hypothesis
538
00:27:52.200 --> 00:27:57.200
that, well, wouldn't it be likely that if it was so warm
539
00:27:57.300 --> 00:28:00.630
that far north in Florida that it was that warm
540
00:28:00.630 --> 00:28:02.520
in the northern Gulf of Mexico,
541
00:28:02.520 --> 00:28:05.070
similar to future projections,
542
00:28:05.070 --> 00:28:08.100
and that maybe there were acroporids
543
00:28:08.100 --> 00:28:11.310
that were underlying the reef basically
544
00:28:11.310 --> 00:28:13.020
in the Flower Garden Banks.
545
00:28:13.020 --> 00:28:17.490
And these would be potential examples
546
00:28:17.490 --> 00:28:20.490
of range shifts in the past.
547
00:28:20.490 --> 00:28:24.150
And this is the sea level curve for the Gulf of Mexico.
548
00:28:24.150 --> 00:28:28.410
We know that at the peak of the last glaciation
549
00:28:28.410 --> 00:28:30.780
some 20,000 years ago,
550
00:28:30.780 --> 00:28:34.890
sea level was about 130 meters lower than it was today.
551
00:28:34.890 --> 00:28:36.730
And as the glaciers melted
552
00:28:38.175 --> 00:28:42.720
through the recent period, sea level has risen.
553
00:28:42.720 --> 00:28:47.160
So at one point the water in the Gulf of Mexico,
554
00:28:47.160 --> 00:28:49.650
the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico
555
00:28:49.650 --> 00:28:52.530
was some 400 feet offshore
556
00:28:52.530 --> 00:28:56.190
from the coast of Texas and Louisiana and Florida.
557
00:28:56.190 --> 00:28:59.670
So imagine how small the Gulf of Mexico was
558
00:28:59.670 --> 00:29:01.983
in comparison to the way it is today.
559
00:29:04.020 --> 00:29:08.820
This is a picture, a cartoon drawing
560
00:29:08.820 --> 00:29:10.200
of the different banks
561
00:29:10.200 --> 00:29:14.400
of the area around the Flower Gardens sanctuary.
562
00:29:14.400 --> 00:29:17.550
And notice in this graph
563
00:29:17.550 --> 00:29:20.550
that you have these boxes in the upper right,
564
00:29:20.550 --> 00:29:24.300
and what we basically have there are temperatures.
565
00:29:24.300 --> 00:29:28.860
And when the temperature gets less than 18 degrees,
566
00:29:28.860 --> 00:29:32.580
temperature is not perfect for reef growth.
567
00:29:32.580 --> 00:29:35.220
And if they're also too deep,
568
00:29:35.220 --> 00:29:37.260
they're out of the photic zone
569
00:29:37.260 --> 00:29:40.020
so they're not perfect for reef growth.
570
00:29:40.020 --> 00:29:42.900
So there's what we call a Goldilocks zone.
571
00:29:42.900 --> 00:29:44.730
And the Goldilocks zone is an area
572
00:29:44.730 --> 00:29:48.420
where water temperatures stay above 18 degrees C
573
00:29:48.420 --> 00:29:50.520
and are within the photic zone.
574
00:29:50.520 --> 00:29:55.050
And the banks that fill that qualification or classification
575
00:29:55.050 --> 00:29:56.250
are the Flower Garden Banks,
576
00:29:56.250 --> 00:29:57.930
the East and West Flower Garden Banks,
577
00:29:57.930 --> 00:29:59.790
which is shown by number six,
578
00:29:59.790 --> 00:30:01.893
which sticks up into that Goldilocks zone.
579
00:30:03.540 --> 00:30:07.170
Reconstructing the geological past,
580
00:30:07.170 --> 00:30:10.890
this was again from that wonderful publication
581
00:30:10.890 --> 00:30:13.320
on the Flower Gardens by Rezak, Bright and McGrail,
582
00:30:13.320 --> 00:30:16.950
and this is their sketch, cartoon drawing
583
00:30:16.950 --> 00:30:20.430
of what the West Flower Garden Bank must have looked like
584
00:30:20.430 --> 00:30:23.670
during the sea level low stand
585
00:30:23.670 --> 00:30:26.970
of the last major glaciation in the Gulf of Mexico.
586
00:30:26.970 --> 00:30:28.710
And basically what you see there,
587
00:30:28.710 --> 00:30:30.558
what the Flower Garden Banks are today,
588
00:30:30.558 --> 00:30:33.690
these salt domes that stick up off the bottom
589
00:30:33.690 --> 00:30:37.080
are these islands in the Gulf of Mexico,
590
00:30:37.080 --> 00:30:40.053
right essentially next to what is now the beach.
591
00:30:42.180 --> 00:30:45.240
What are today 110 miles offshore
592
00:30:45.240 --> 00:30:48.580
were basically very, very close to the shoreline
593
00:30:49.982 --> 00:30:52.080
at 20,000 years ago.
594
00:30:52.080 --> 00:30:55.950
And when we take the reconstruction
595
00:30:55.950 --> 00:30:57.357
of the Flower Gardens
596
00:30:57.357 --> 00:31:02.357
and we take today's 3D mosaic of the bank
597
00:31:03.030 --> 00:31:05.340
and we drop sea level,
598
00:31:05.340 --> 00:31:08.640
we basically have this beautifully exposed island,
599
00:31:08.640 --> 00:31:12.720
like I said, and this is the East Bank.
600
00:31:12.720 --> 00:31:14.490
And as we raise sea level,
601
00:31:14.490 --> 00:31:18.210
as we melt the ice caps,
602
00:31:18.210 --> 00:31:21.203
we then get to negative 90 meters
603
00:31:21.203 --> 00:31:24.210
and the lower parts of the bank's flood.
604
00:31:24.210 --> 00:31:26.400
And then we flood some more,
605
00:31:26.400 --> 00:31:29.760
we melt some more glaciers, we get to minus 60 meters.
606
00:31:29.760 --> 00:31:31.620
And now we have a smaller island
607
00:31:31.620 --> 00:31:34.650
where only the cap of the bank there is exposed.
608
00:31:34.650 --> 00:31:36.660
It's now a free-floating island
609
00:31:36.660 --> 00:31:39.840
out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
610
00:31:39.840 --> 00:31:44.010
And at about 12,000 years ago or so,
611
00:31:44.010 --> 00:31:46.320
there's just a little tiny bit
612
00:31:46.320 --> 00:31:51.210
of this pinnacle basically
613
00:31:51.210 --> 00:31:52.650
out in the Gulf of Mexico
614
00:31:52.650 --> 00:31:55.200
that was sticking out of the ocean.
615
00:31:55.200 --> 00:31:58.950
And then between 10 and 12,000 years ago,
616
00:31:58.950 --> 00:32:00.870
it gets totally submerged,
617
00:32:00.870 --> 00:32:02.583
and we have the banks of today.
618
00:32:03.810 --> 00:32:08.700
So when we try to reconstruct the geology,
619
00:32:08.700 --> 00:32:10.470
the geologic history,
620
00:32:10.470 --> 00:32:15.150
what we have here is the estimated sea level curve
621
00:32:16.410 --> 00:32:18.180
or line on the banks
622
00:32:18.180 --> 00:32:22.020
of where sea level was at 11,000 years ago.
623
00:32:22.020 --> 00:32:25.080
And that was a time when you had that little tiny island
624
00:32:25.080 --> 00:32:28.380
sticking up out of the Gulf.
625
00:32:28.380 --> 00:32:31.350
The square that you see here is the area
626
00:32:31.350 --> 00:32:33.870
of the long-term monitoring program.
627
00:32:33.870 --> 00:32:36.240
And the area in orange is an area
628
00:32:36.240 --> 00:32:39.870
that's very, very interesting because this is an area
629
00:32:39.870 --> 00:32:42.360
that we made some interesting discoveries.
630
00:32:42.360 --> 00:32:44.070
And in the mid-Holocene,
631
00:32:44.070 --> 00:32:47.490
underneath the reef cap in some swim-throughs,
632
00:32:47.490 --> 00:32:50.550
we saw this on one of the dives.
633
00:32:50.550 --> 00:32:54.090
And on this dive I was with Ernesto Weil
634
00:32:54.090 --> 00:32:58.350
and Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley, and we were doing a dive
635
00:32:58.350 --> 00:33:01.170
and we were just doing some species IDs.
636
00:33:01.170 --> 00:33:03.780
I think we were doing random swim surveys.
637
00:33:03.780 --> 00:33:05.910
We went into this little swim-through
638
00:33:05.910 --> 00:33:09.300
and saw these in situ fossilized,
639
00:33:09.300 --> 00:33:13.350
sub-fossil giant pieces of Acropora palmata
640
00:33:13.350 --> 00:33:15.510
in growth position.
641
00:33:15.510 --> 00:33:20.510
And we went in and we looked at this in close contact,
642
00:33:20.670 --> 00:33:24.990
and then basically I went back to the boat after the dive.
643
00:33:24.990 --> 00:33:27.967
I talked to GP and Emma and I basically said,
644
00:33:27.967 --> 00:33:30.110
"I believe that there's Acropora palmata
645
00:33:30.110 --> 00:33:32.160
in some of these swim-throughs.
646
00:33:32.160 --> 00:33:34.110
Can I have permission to collect some?"
647
00:33:34.110 --> 00:33:36.000
And they said, yes, you're granted,
648
00:33:36.000 --> 00:33:37.650
through our collection permit
649
00:33:37.650 --> 00:33:38.987
through the Flower Garden Banks.
650
00:33:38.987 --> 00:33:41.730
I went down there, took a little rock hammer
651
00:33:41.730 --> 00:33:45.150
and knocked off some of these pieces,
652
00:33:45.150 --> 00:33:48.900
slabs of coral that appeared to me
653
00:33:48.900 --> 00:33:51.120
to look like Acropora palmata
654
00:33:51.120 --> 00:33:54.693
that I'd seen in fossil sequences in Florida.
655
00:33:55.800 --> 00:33:59.100
And sure enough, we got these samples back
656
00:33:59.100 --> 00:34:02.910
and sent them off for radiocarbon dating,
657
00:34:02.910 --> 00:34:05.430
and we got dates back that ranged
658
00:34:05.430 --> 00:34:08.970
between 10,0000 and 6,800 years.
659
00:34:08.970 --> 00:34:12.180
So this basically confirmed
660
00:34:12.180 --> 00:34:15.630
that the northernmost fossil reefs of Acropora
661
00:34:15.630 --> 00:34:18.680
were corresponding in age with that
662
00:34:18.680 --> 00:34:20.880
of the Holocene thermal maximum
663
00:34:20.880 --> 00:34:23.940
of these reefs underpinning the Flower Garden Banks.
664
00:34:23.940 --> 00:34:27.870
And this is a sample that we took in 2007.
665
00:34:27.870 --> 00:34:29.910
And the lower part
666
00:34:29.910 --> 00:34:32.250
of the sample that you see there
667
00:34:32.250 --> 00:34:36.120
is a branch or a blade of Acropora palmata,
668
00:34:36.120 --> 00:34:40.830
and it is covered with submarine cement and sediment
669
00:34:40.830 --> 00:34:44.550
that formed while it was buried in this cave.
670
00:34:44.550 --> 00:34:45.870
And those little red things
671
00:34:45.870 --> 00:34:48.150
that you see dotted on the surface
672
00:34:48.150 --> 00:34:50.910
is actually an encrusting foramenifera
673
00:34:50.910 --> 00:34:52.473
called Homotrema rubrum.
674
00:34:53.490 --> 00:34:55.750
So we were able to then reconstruct
675
00:34:56.730 --> 00:35:00.960
where these corals were in time and in space
676
00:35:00.960 --> 00:35:04.711
compared to the sea level curve for the Gulf of Mexico.
677
00:35:04.711 --> 00:35:08.730
And what we found was that the Acropora reefs just lag
678
00:35:08.730 --> 00:35:12.810
slightly behind the rate of sea level rise.
679
00:35:12.810 --> 00:35:16.770
And eventually as sea level continued to rise,
680
00:35:16.770 --> 00:35:19.740
they were unable to keep pace with sea level,
681
00:35:19.740 --> 00:35:22.440
they became drowned in deeper water,
682
00:35:22.440 --> 00:35:25.206
and then the deeper water community
683
00:35:25.206 --> 00:35:27.780
of the present-day banks,
684
00:35:27.780 --> 00:35:30.720
the large massive corals basically grew
685
00:35:30.720 --> 00:35:34.680
on top of the former shallower water assemblage
686
00:35:34.680 --> 00:35:38.343
that we saw back in the mid to early Holocene.
687
00:35:39.510 --> 00:35:42.900
So a year after we made this remarkable discovery
688
00:35:42.900 --> 00:35:46.350
of Acropora palmata, which really was remarkable,
689
00:35:46.350 --> 00:35:51.330
and it showed that these reefs were these high energy,
690
00:35:51.330 --> 00:35:56.330
shallow water reefs at 10,000 years ago,
691
00:35:56.370 --> 00:35:58.800
but then through time as sea level rose,
692
00:35:58.800 --> 00:36:00.780
they got deeper and deeper.
693
00:36:00.780 --> 00:36:02.484
This was a dive that I was doing
694
00:36:02.484 --> 00:36:05.250
and Ken Deslarzes is the person diving
695
00:36:05.250 --> 00:36:07.920
in the left-hand portion of this photograph.
696
00:36:07.920 --> 00:36:10.800
And this was diving right after the passage,
697
00:36:10.800 --> 00:36:13.290
I believe it was, of Hurricane Ivan.
698
00:36:13.290 --> 00:36:17.190
And there is what's known as a Madracis field
699
00:36:17.190 --> 00:36:19.890
on the flank of the East Flower Garden Banks
700
00:36:19.890 --> 00:36:22.500
down deeper than 90 feet of water,
701
00:36:22.500 --> 00:36:25.440
from 90 down from there.
702
00:36:25.440 --> 00:36:26.430
You can still see some
703
00:36:26.430 --> 00:36:29.010
of the large massive Orbicella colonies
704
00:36:29.010 --> 00:36:30.600
in this photograph as well.
705
00:36:30.600 --> 00:36:34.140
But note right smack dab in the middle of the photograph
706
00:36:34.140 --> 00:36:35.910
just to the right of Ken,
707
00:36:35.910 --> 00:36:40.110
there's a depression, a hole that has coral rubble in it.
708
00:36:40.110 --> 00:36:44.070
And my joke here is, hey Ken, you see what I see
709
00:36:44.070 --> 00:36:47.160
because when we swam down into this hole
710
00:36:47.160 --> 00:36:50.130
that was created, this was a blowhole created
711
00:36:50.130 --> 00:36:53.220
by the hurricane in this field of Madracis,
712
00:36:53.220 --> 00:36:57.930
this slate pencil coral,
713
00:36:57.930 --> 00:37:00.780
yellow pencil coral,
714
00:37:00.780 --> 00:37:03.510
we basically found these branches
715
00:37:03.510 --> 00:37:07.020
that miraculously looked like Acropora cervicornis
716
00:37:07.020 --> 00:37:10.200
that I'd seen from the Florida Keys.
717
00:37:10.200 --> 00:37:11.910
So what I did was I took these samples,
718
00:37:11.910 --> 00:37:13.050
I picked these samples up,
719
00:37:13.050 --> 00:37:15.090
these are obviously dead colonies
720
00:37:15.090 --> 00:37:17.280
that were exposed during the storm,
721
00:37:17.280 --> 00:37:19.470
I stuck them in my BC pocket.
722
00:37:19.470 --> 00:37:23.490
I went back to the boat and when I got back to the boat,
723
00:37:23.490 --> 00:37:27.600
GP and Emma were about to go on a dive themselves,
724
00:37:27.600 --> 00:37:29.970
and they basically said, "Hey, how was your dive?"
725
00:37:29.970 --> 00:37:31.770
And I said, "You won't believe this,
726
00:37:31.770 --> 00:37:34.860
but I think we found Acropora cervicornis
727
00:37:34.860 --> 00:37:37.620
on the flank of the East Flower Garden Banks."
728
00:37:37.620 --> 00:37:39.480
And GP laughed and he looked at me,
729
00:37:39.480 --> 00:37:42.360
and I opened my BC pocket and I pulled it out
730
00:37:42.360 --> 00:37:43.530
and I handed it to him.
731
00:37:43.530 --> 00:37:45.600
And he laughed and he thought I was pulling his leg.
732
00:37:45.600 --> 00:37:49.590
He thought I had picked these corals up in Florida,
733
00:37:49.590 --> 00:37:51.210
put 'em in my BC, brought 'em down
734
00:37:51.210 --> 00:37:55.350
and I was gonna tell him that I found these, ha ha,
735
00:37:55.350 --> 00:37:57.570
after the discovery of the year before.
736
00:37:57.570 --> 00:37:59.580
And I said, "No, this is not from Florida.
737
00:37:59.580 --> 00:38:02.520
I'm serious. We found these corals."
738
00:38:02.520 --> 00:38:04.920
And GP and Emma went on their dive
739
00:38:04.920 --> 00:38:07.200
and they went to the same location.
740
00:38:07.200 --> 00:38:08.610
And they were gone for a bit.
741
00:38:08.610 --> 00:38:10.590
And when they came back to the boat,
742
00:38:10.590 --> 00:38:13.530
Emma looked at me and her eyes were popping out of her head
743
00:38:13.530 --> 00:38:17.910
and she said, "Bill, we just didn't find cervicornis,
744
00:38:17.910 --> 00:38:20.730
we found a whole reef of cervicornis."
745
00:38:20.730 --> 00:38:24.810
So the whole entire area where that Madracis field was
746
00:38:24.810 --> 00:38:28.380
was totally underlined
747
00:38:28.380 --> 00:38:30.180
by Acropora cervicornis.
748
00:38:30.180 --> 00:38:31.980
And this is what it looked like when you looked
749
00:38:31.980 --> 00:38:34.590
in swim-throughs and cavities on the bank.
750
00:38:34.590 --> 00:38:37.559
And these are are the samples that we took
751
00:38:37.559 --> 00:38:38.759
of Acropora cervicornis.
752
00:38:39.871 --> 00:38:43.110
The other coral that we found, which was pretty remarkable,
753
00:38:43.110 --> 00:38:46.023
is this flower coral called Eusmilia fastigiata.
754
00:38:46.950 --> 00:38:51.390
And there are no known living colonies
755
00:38:51.390 --> 00:38:55.950
of Eusmilia fastigiata on the Flower Garden Banks.
756
00:38:55.950 --> 00:38:59.580
However, where we found the Acropora cervicornis,
757
00:38:59.580 --> 00:39:02.640
we also found some that had lived there
758
00:39:02.640 --> 00:39:05.100
in the geological past.
759
00:39:05.100 --> 00:39:07.110
So when we dated all these things,
760
00:39:07.110 --> 00:39:09.570
we came up with two different ages.
761
00:39:09.570 --> 00:39:12.750
We came up with this older date for the mid-Holocene,
762
00:39:12.750 --> 00:39:15.270
but much younger dates for the Acropora.
763
00:39:15.270 --> 00:39:20.270
And what it appears is that during the medieval warm period,
764
00:39:20.670 --> 00:39:25.670
there was about between a thousand years ago or so,
765
00:39:25.920 --> 00:39:30.630
and about 200 years ago there was a warm period,
766
00:39:30.630 --> 00:39:32.820
or 300 years ago there was a warm period.
767
00:39:32.820 --> 00:39:35.970
And during this little tiny flicker of warm,
768
00:39:35.970 --> 00:39:39.990
these cervicornis colonies lived on the flanks of the bank.
769
00:39:39.990 --> 00:39:43.830
And then when it got really cold during the little ice age
770
00:39:43.830 --> 00:39:45.780
where you see the arrow focused,
771
00:39:45.780 --> 00:39:47.730
it got too cold for these corals
772
00:39:47.730 --> 00:39:50.730
because again it got too cold for their thermal tolerances.
773
00:39:50.730 --> 00:39:55.140
They all died and were covered by that Madracis field.
774
00:39:55.140 --> 00:39:59.550
So basically our team wrote a paper
775
00:39:59.550 --> 00:40:01.020
and we called it "Back to the future:
776
00:40:01.020 --> 00:40:03.840
The history of acroporid corals at the Flower Garden Banks".
777
00:40:03.840 --> 00:40:06.060
This was published in 2014
778
00:40:06.060 --> 00:40:08.850
as essentially the presentation I've given you tonight.
779
00:40:08.850 --> 00:40:11.700
So the conclusion, discovery of fossil Acropora
780
00:40:11.700 --> 00:40:14.430
has had profound implications for our understanding
781
00:40:14.430 --> 00:40:15.263
of the history of reef development
782
00:40:15.263 --> 00:40:16.857
at the Flower Garden Banks.
783
00:40:16.857 --> 00:40:18.240
And it puts the discovery
784
00:40:18.240 --> 00:40:21.750
of the recent extant colonies found in context.
785
00:40:21.750 --> 00:40:24.930
So there has been this happened before
786
00:40:24.930 --> 00:40:27.870
and it's pretty, pretty exciting.
787
00:40:27.870 --> 00:40:30.300
So this reconstructing the development
788
00:40:30.300 --> 00:40:32.310
in light of this information shows
789
00:40:32.310 --> 00:40:35.010
that there was a deepening upwards succession
790
00:40:35.010 --> 00:40:36.930
from a shallow water community
791
00:40:36.930 --> 00:40:40.170
that eventually lagged behind the rapidly rising sea level
792
00:40:40.170 --> 00:40:43.555
of the early to middle Holocene that was eventually drowned
793
00:40:43.555 --> 00:40:46.980
and subsequently capped by the present-day reef community.
794
00:40:46.980 --> 00:40:48.720
And I will say to this day,
795
00:40:48.720 --> 00:40:51.660
this discovery raises more questions than it answers,
796
00:40:51.660 --> 00:40:53.370
but it does answer a lot of questions,
797
00:40:53.370 --> 00:40:54.870
especially with regards
798
00:40:54.870 --> 00:40:58.320
to local turn-on and turn-off mechanisms
799
00:40:58.320 --> 00:41:02.610
of why these staghorn and elkhorn corals
800
00:41:02.610 --> 00:41:05.550
basically come and go as rapidly as they do.
801
00:41:05.550 --> 00:41:09.120
And does that give us any insight
802
00:41:09.120 --> 00:41:11.043
into what might happen in the future?
803
00:41:11.940 --> 00:41:15.780
So in summary, I'll let you read this,
804
00:41:15.780 --> 00:41:19.350
but basically saying that mid-Holocene,
805
00:41:19.350 --> 00:41:23.400
beautiful development of the Acropora palmata,
806
00:41:23.400 --> 00:41:26.820
later in the late Holocene,
807
00:41:26.820 --> 00:41:30.510
development of Acropora cervicornis, the staghorn coral,
808
00:41:30.510 --> 00:41:34.170
and then the demise was at peak exposure
809
00:41:34.170 --> 00:41:37.020
of the little ice age about 200 years before present
810
00:41:37.020 --> 00:41:39.150
when none of those Acropora could make it through.
811
00:41:39.150 --> 00:41:43.110
And the modern eurythermal coral assemblages dominated
812
00:41:43.110 --> 00:41:47.370
by massive corals on the cap and Madracis on the flanks
813
00:41:47.370 --> 00:41:51.933
are really something of only the last few hundred years.
814
00:41:53.070 --> 00:41:55.470
Some of the head corals, maybe 500 years,
815
00:41:55.470 --> 00:41:57.360
but it's a different community
816
00:41:57.360 --> 00:42:00.543
than existed thousands of years ago.
817
00:42:01.890 --> 00:42:05.490
So this is a picture of Jamaica
818
00:42:05.490 --> 00:42:08.910
in the early, mid-1970s,
819
00:42:08.910 --> 00:42:11.160
and it shows what the cap
820
00:42:11.160 --> 00:42:14.490
of the Flower Garden Banks might have looked like
821
00:42:14.490 --> 00:42:19.410
some 6 to say 8,000 years before present.
822
00:42:19.410 --> 00:42:22.620
So what's next? Core, core, core.
823
00:42:22.620 --> 00:42:24.390
The only way we can get more information
824
00:42:24.390 --> 00:42:28.883
about the geological history of the banks is to get deeper
825
00:42:29.730 --> 00:42:32.580
within the reef cap of the bank
826
00:42:32.580 --> 00:42:35.193
and understand what lies beneath.
827
00:42:37.020 --> 00:42:39.330
And this is two different coring techniques.
828
00:42:39.330 --> 00:42:42.510
One is drilling method and one is a push-coring method.
829
00:42:42.510 --> 00:42:45.540
But there are basically exciting things
830
00:42:45.540 --> 00:42:47.400
that still need to be learned
831
00:42:47.400 --> 00:42:50.640
both geologically and ecologically at the bank.
832
00:42:50.640 --> 00:42:55.530
And I am dedicating this talk to the memory of Marty Heaney.
833
00:42:55.530 --> 00:42:59.640
Marty was a scientist who was part of our team,
834
00:42:59.640 --> 00:43:02.970
a very important part of our team
835
00:43:02.970 --> 00:43:06.360
during the eight years or so we monitored the banks.
836
00:43:06.360 --> 00:43:08.610
And we lost Marty a few years ago.
837
00:43:08.610 --> 00:43:09.633
Thank you very much.
838
00:43:12.913 --> 00:43:14.670
Wow, thank you, Bill.
839
00:43:14.670 --> 00:43:15.963
That was fantastic.
840
00:43:17.490 --> 00:43:19.770
We have a few questions already lined up
841
00:43:19.770 --> 00:43:21.750
but folks, if you have any more questions
842
00:43:21.750 --> 00:43:23.640
in your mind right now,
843
00:43:23.640 --> 00:43:27.870
please be sure to mark them down
844
00:43:27.870 --> 00:43:30.240
in the question bar box
845
00:43:30.240 --> 00:43:33.030
that you can find in the webinar control panel.
846
00:43:33.030 --> 00:43:34.200
Type in your questions.
847
00:43:34.200 --> 00:43:36.630
I have Kelly and Leslie in the background
848
00:43:36.630 --> 00:43:38.640
helping me sort through them and prioritize them
849
00:43:38.640 --> 00:43:42.120
so we can ask Bill a few of these as we go along.
850
00:43:42.120 --> 00:43:45.693
So Bill, are you ready?
851
00:43:49.500 --> 00:43:50.790
Okay, first question.
852
00:43:50.790 --> 00:43:53.070
Do you think if we see continuing warming
853
00:43:53.070 --> 00:43:54.630
that we will see a regrowth
854
00:43:54.630 --> 00:43:56.703
of coral reefs closer to the shoreline?
855
00:44:00.518 --> 00:44:02.790
Probably not, and the reason is
856
00:44:02.790 --> 00:44:06.690
that the community types closer to shore
857
00:44:06.690 --> 00:44:08.820
are a couple things.
858
00:44:08.820 --> 00:44:11.850
One is there's too much soft sediments,
859
00:44:11.850 --> 00:44:14.160
siliciclastic sediments that run off
860
00:44:14.160 --> 00:44:16.470
into the Gulf of Mexico.
861
00:44:16.470 --> 00:44:19.500
So it's not just a temperature thing.
862
00:44:19.500 --> 00:44:21.933
But even with temperature warming,
863
00:44:22.860 --> 00:44:26.610
in the shallow waters of the Gulf,
864
00:44:26.610 --> 00:44:29.100
one thing we know with climate change is
865
00:44:29.100 --> 00:44:32.610
while the average temperatures get warmer,
866
00:44:32.610 --> 00:44:36.060
there are also more extremes to what we see.
867
00:44:36.060 --> 00:44:40.980
And obviously, you guys in Texas who are on this call know
868
00:44:40.980 --> 00:44:44.550
what I'm talking about because we've had these cold snaps
869
00:44:44.550 --> 00:44:48.570
in southern Texas and snow and ice in areas,
870
00:44:48.570 --> 00:44:51.570
and all you have to do is have one event like that
871
00:44:51.570 --> 00:44:54.360
where the temperature, nearshore temperature drops
872
00:44:54.360 --> 00:44:57.540
below 15 degrees C, and you essentially kill
873
00:44:57.540 --> 00:45:01.170
not just the acroporid corals, but you kill all corals.
874
00:45:01.170 --> 00:45:05.700
So the likelihood of shallow water reefs forming
875
00:45:05.700 --> 00:45:09.390
in the shallower water areas in the northern Gulf of Mexico
876
00:45:09.390 --> 00:45:11.193
is highly unlikely.
877
00:45:15.510 --> 00:45:17.280
Okay. And along with that,
878
00:45:17.280 --> 00:45:19.560
we've got a couple related questions.
879
00:45:19.560 --> 00:45:23.030
Do you expect staghorn and elkhorns to recolonize
880
00:45:23.030 --> 00:45:25.563
at the Flower Gardens with warming seas?
881
00:45:27.118 --> 00:45:30.330
As far as I haven't been out to the Flower Gardens
882
00:45:30.330 --> 00:45:33.150
in a few years, and I haven't been following
883
00:45:33.150 --> 00:45:36.240
any of the recent discoveries, but as far as I know,
884
00:45:36.240 --> 00:45:39.330
the colonies that were found back in the 2000s
885
00:45:39.330 --> 00:45:44.330
were the only colonies that have been found living to date.
886
00:45:44.400 --> 00:45:47.220
But it will be interesting to see if more arrive.
887
00:45:47.220 --> 00:45:49.200
And also the amount of area
888
00:45:49.200 --> 00:45:51.600
on top of the Flower Garden Banks
889
00:45:51.600 --> 00:45:55.590
that is monitored annually by scientists
890
00:45:55.590 --> 00:46:00.590
as well as by recreational dive operations
891
00:46:00.810 --> 00:46:03.060
is really small in area compared
892
00:46:03.060 --> 00:46:07.080
to the total size of the banks,
893
00:46:07.080 --> 00:46:09.870
of the total area of the caps of the bank.
894
00:46:09.870 --> 00:46:14.845
So there's a lot of area that annually go unchecked
895
00:46:14.845 --> 00:46:16.740
on the tops of the bank.
896
00:46:16.740 --> 00:46:19.350
So it's really unknown how many,
897
00:46:19.350 --> 00:46:21.750
because these are rare species now.
898
00:46:21.750 --> 00:46:26.160
So if they came in and there were say a dozen or two dozen,
899
00:46:26.160 --> 00:46:28.290
the likelihood of you seeing them on a dive
900
00:46:28.290 --> 00:46:31.260
or on an outing is pretty unlikely.
901
00:46:31.260 --> 00:46:32.760
So it was really fortuitous
902
00:46:32.760 --> 00:46:34.590
that we found the two that we found,
903
00:46:34.590 --> 00:46:37.983
'cause those happened to be right within our study plots.
904
00:46:41.250 --> 00:46:43.110
My thoughts exactly,
905
00:46:43.110 --> 00:46:46.177
very fortuitous that they were in our nice study sites.
906
00:46:47.400 --> 00:46:50.670
Are there any plans to try and restore these reefs
907
00:46:50.670 --> 00:46:52.863
by growing these corals in the lab?
908
00:46:55.110 --> 00:46:59.160
Well, there would be an ethical issue there
909
00:46:59.160 --> 00:47:01.920
because right now the Flower Garden Banks
910
00:47:01.920 --> 00:47:04.770
are amongst the healthiest reefs in the world.
911
00:47:04.770 --> 00:47:08.580
And they are reefs that live,
912
00:47:08.580 --> 00:47:12.000
the shallowest part of the reef is in 65 feet of water
913
00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:14.160
and they go down deeper from there.
914
00:47:14.160 --> 00:47:16.290
So the corals that we're talking about,
915
00:47:16.290 --> 00:47:18.570
like with the acroporid corals,
916
00:47:18.570 --> 00:47:21.060
those are really shallow water species.
917
00:47:21.060 --> 00:47:23.460
So the question would be, why would we wanna bring
918
00:47:23.460 --> 00:47:27.060
shallow water species into a deeper water environment?
919
00:47:27.060 --> 00:47:28.410
We likely wouldn't.
920
00:47:28.410 --> 00:47:31.680
However, if there was some catastrophe
921
00:47:31.680 --> 00:47:34.377
that killed some of these deeper water corals
922
00:47:34.377 --> 00:47:38.130
and some of these massive corals on the caps of the bank,
923
00:47:38.130 --> 00:47:41.940
there are nursery facilities and outplanting things
924
00:47:41.940 --> 00:47:46.320
using boulder corals today, where in the near future,
925
00:47:46.320 --> 00:47:49.530
if a restoration project needed to happen,
926
00:47:49.530 --> 00:47:52.950
certainly it could be done
927
00:47:52.950 --> 00:47:54.840
with the nursery help
928
00:47:54.840 --> 00:47:58.473
and outplanting of these boulder corals.
929
00:48:02.520 --> 00:48:05.513
Thank you. Do you believe that these corals
930
00:48:05.513 --> 00:48:08.893
will be able to successfully compete with the current corals
931
00:48:08.893 --> 00:48:12.194
that are already conditioned to the present-day conditions?
932
00:48:12.194 --> 00:48:14.970
So I guess they're referring to the two palmatas
933
00:48:14.970 --> 00:48:17.010
that are out there now.
934
00:48:17.010 --> 00:48:20.790
Well, it's really interesting because if you,
935
00:48:20.790 --> 00:48:23.040
and I can't go back and and show you,
936
00:48:23.040 --> 00:48:27.120
but there's that one picture of the Acropora palmata,
937
00:48:27.120 --> 00:48:28.683
the one that Beth found,
938
00:48:29.670 --> 00:48:32.520
and it was a picture I think that was taken
939
00:48:32.520 --> 00:48:35.610
by GP or Emma in 2012.
940
00:48:35.610 --> 00:48:38.010
And you can actually see
941
00:48:38.010 --> 00:48:40.920
how the coral is competing.
942
00:48:40.920 --> 00:48:42.330
Yeah, that's the picture.
943
00:48:42.330 --> 00:48:45.150
You can see how the picture,
944
00:48:45.150 --> 00:48:47.700
you can see where the Acropora and another coral
945
00:48:47.700 --> 00:48:50.250
are coming in contact with each other.
946
00:48:50.250 --> 00:48:53.640
And while they're fighting with each other,
947
00:48:53.640 --> 00:48:55.170
they're living side by side.
948
00:48:55.170 --> 00:48:57.753
Exactly the person (indistinct). Thank you.
949
00:48:58.590 --> 00:49:02.460
So if there's open space on a reef
950
00:49:02.460 --> 00:49:06.990
and that space can be colonized, it would be interesting.
951
00:49:06.990 --> 00:49:09.360
Now the thing about Acropora palmata is
952
00:49:09.360 --> 00:49:12.807
it's one of the fastest growing corals in shallow water,
953
00:49:12.807 --> 00:49:15.570
and in shallow water it grows so fast
954
00:49:15.570 --> 00:49:17.940
that it outcompetes other corals
955
00:49:17.940 --> 00:49:21.360
because it grows up above them and shades them out.
956
00:49:21.360 --> 00:49:23.310
And that's really the competitive advantage
957
00:49:23.310 --> 00:49:25.590
that Acropora has in shallow water
958
00:49:25.590 --> 00:49:27.510
as well as being wave-resistant.
959
00:49:27.510 --> 00:49:31.080
And in this case, I don't think they grow fast enough
960
00:49:31.080 --> 00:49:34.830
at the Flower Garden Banks that they would outcompete corals
961
00:49:34.830 --> 00:49:37.920
in a vertical direction and shade them out,
962
00:49:37.920 --> 00:49:40.443
although who knows what the future will bring.
963
00:49:45.090 --> 00:49:47.880
All right, next question.
964
00:49:47.880 --> 00:49:50.070
If global warming keeps melting glaciers,
965
00:49:50.070 --> 00:49:51.840
then the sea level will keep rising,
966
00:49:51.840 --> 00:49:54.030
which will increase the depth of the existing corals,
967
00:49:54.030 --> 00:49:55.890
which means less sunlight.
968
00:49:55.890 --> 00:49:58.080
Does this mean corals not only are at risk
969
00:49:58.080 --> 00:50:01.380
for ocean acidification, but also from sea level rise
970
00:50:01.380 --> 00:50:03.680
and cooling temperatures from the melting ice?
971
00:50:05.610 --> 00:50:08.460
So if we look at the IPCC projections
972
00:50:08.460 --> 00:50:10.110
for sea level rise,
973
00:50:10.110 --> 00:50:12.300
which even in the worst case scenario
974
00:50:12.300 --> 00:50:17.130
say, over the next few centuries is a couple meters or so,
975
00:50:17.130 --> 00:50:20.970
a meter and a half or so in a couple hundred years,
976
00:50:20.970 --> 00:50:25.200
if that occurs, if you think about the Flower Garden Banks,
977
00:50:25.200 --> 00:50:30.200
if you're a coral and you're living in 65 feet of water
978
00:50:31.260 --> 00:50:35.430
and sea level rises a meter,
979
00:50:35.430 --> 00:50:39.480
now all of a sudden you're in, instead of 65 feet of water,
980
00:50:39.480 --> 00:50:41.880
you're in 68 feet of water.
981
00:50:41.880 --> 00:50:44.550
So to a deep water coral, that three feet
982
00:50:44.550 --> 00:50:46.980
really doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
983
00:50:46.980 --> 00:50:49.230
However, if you're a shallow water coral living
984
00:50:49.230 --> 00:50:51.000
on some Caribbean island,
985
00:50:51.000 --> 00:50:53.940
and you live very close to sea level
986
00:50:53.940 --> 00:50:57.210
and you're living, say in a zone
987
00:50:57.210 --> 00:51:00.180
that is currently less than two meters
988
00:51:00.180 --> 00:51:03.420
and all of a sudden you drop sea level or rise sea level,
989
00:51:03.420 --> 00:51:06.150
excuse me, by a meter or a meter and a half,
990
00:51:06.150 --> 00:51:09.660
now instead of being in five feet of water,
991
00:51:09.660 --> 00:51:10.980
you're in nine feet of water,
992
00:51:10.980 --> 00:51:13.050
that could make a big difference.
993
00:51:13.050 --> 00:51:16.380
So it really depends on the reef and where you are.
994
00:51:16.380 --> 00:51:19.620
But sea level rise in the future
995
00:51:19.620 --> 00:51:22.680
will have very little effect, I believe,
996
00:51:22.680 --> 00:51:25.050
on the reefs of the Flower Gardens.
997
00:51:25.050 --> 00:51:28.830
What we have to be mindful of in the Flower Gardens
998
00:51:28.830 --> 00:51:32.490
is ever-increasing sea surface temperatures,
999
00:51:32.490 --> 00:51:36.750
increased bleaching events,
1000
00:51:36.750 --> 00:51:38.400
more bleaching events.
1001
00:51:38.400 --> 00:51:43.380
And bleaching events due to warm water stresses the coral.
1002
00:51:43.380 --> 00:51:45.000
And when corals get stressed,
1003
00:51:45.000 --> 00:51:48.720
their immune systems become compromised
1004
00:51:48.720 --> 00:51:51.960
and then they become more susceptible to disease.
1005
00:51:51.960 --> 00:51:56.400
So that would be my greatest fear for the future
1006
00:51:56.400 --> 00:52:00.930
would be the temperature that is seen on an annual basis,
1007
00:52:00.930 --> 00:52:04.890
not just in the summer, but annual basis in the banks
1008
00:52:04.890 --> 00:52:09.890
and what the long-term prognosis for reef health would be
1009
00:52:09.900 --> 00:52:12.453
related to temperature, not sea level rise.
1010
00:52:13.730 --> 00:52:16.020
Okay, I've got a little bit different one
1011
00:52:16.020 --> 00:52:17.490
for you this time, Bill.
1012
00:52:17.490 --> 00:52:20.760
We have Greg Boland on the line and he says
1013
00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:23.280
maybe you should relate the funny story
1014
00:52:23.280 --> 00:52:26.160
about the cervicornis found tied to a coral head
1015
00:52:26.160 --> 00:52:29.430
at the Flower Garden Banks in 1979.
1016
00:52:29.430 --> 00:52:31.050
I can relate to this story,
1017
00:52:31.050 --> 00:52:33.450
and Greg actually, I believe,
1018
00:52:33.450 --> 00:52:35.733
is in possession of those colonies.
1019
00:52:36.720 --> 00:52:41.340
There was a group of geologists and biologists who worked
1020
00:52:41.340 --> 00:52:45.090
for the United States Geological Survey in Florida.
1021
00:52:45.090 --> 00:52:48.150
And one summer they took a bunch
1022
00:52:48.150 --> 00:52:53.040
of Acropora cervicornis from Florida,
1023
00:52:53.040 --> 00:52:57.630
kept it in live bubbler systems on their boat,
1024
00:52:57.630 --> 00:53:01.140
and they took a boat trip from the Florida Keys
1025
00:53:01.140 --> 00:53:03.090
to the Flower Garden Banks
1026
00:53:03.090 --> 00:53:06.630
and lived out on the Flower Garden Banks for a week or two.
1027
00:53:06.630 --> 00:53:08.550
And when they were out there,
1028
00:53:08.550 --> 00:53:12.630
they outplanted Acropora cervicornis to the reef
1029
00:53:12.630 --> 00:53:16.650
and also to some of the legs of the oil and gas platforms
1030
00:53:16.650 --> 00:53:18.570
because they wanted to see
1031
00:53:18.570 --> 00:53:21.840
if they planted Acropora cervicornis there,
1032
00:53:21.840 --> 00:53:26.840
whether or not they would live through the wintertime.
1033
00:53:26.850 --> 00:53:28.590
So they were gonna go back the next summer
1034
00:53:28.590 --> 00:53:30.420
and see what happened to them.
1035
00:53:30.420 --> 00:53:35.420
And when this group from, I believe it was Texas A&M
1036
00:53:35.430 --> 00:53:38.400
and the Texas Sea Grant,
1037
00:53:38.400 --> 00:53:41.040
and I believe the charge was led by Tom Bright,
1038
00:53:41.040 --> 00:53:43.230
and Greg Boland was part of that effort,
1039
00:53:43.230 --> 00:53:45.540
they heard about this and they went out
1040
00:53:45.540 --> 00:53:48.780
and they retrieved all of those corals
1041
00:53:48.780 --> 00:53:50.280
that were taken in from Florida
1042
00:53:50.280 --> 00:53:52.740
and removed them from the reef.
1043
00:53:52.740 --> 00:53:56.733
And that experiment was shot in the leg before it started.
1044
00:54:00.272 --> 00:54:02.138
Kind of funny, but yeah,
1045
00:54:02.138 --> 00:54:03.840
we have to be really careful
1046
00:54:03.840 --> 00:54:06.360
about not moving things from one location to another
1047
00:54:06.360 --> 00:54:09.240
without anticipating the consequences.
1048
00:54:09.240 --> 00:54:11.430
Now again, we have to remember when this was done,
1049
00:54:11.430 --> 00:54:16.430
this was done in the mid, early 1970s, I believe,
1050
00:54:16.740 --> 00:54:20.010
maybe late '70s, but it was done a long time ago.
1051
00:54:20.010 --> 00:54:23.250
And it was before people even gave consideration
1052
00:54:23.250 --> 00:54:25.680
to what the different genotypes
1053
00:54:25.680 --> 00:54:30.570
and moving species around from one place to another.
1054
00:54:30.570 --> 00:54:33.390
And at the time this would've been the introduction
1055
00:54:33.390 --> 00:54:35.040
of an exotic species, right?
1056
00:54:35.040 --> 00:54:36.947
Because it did not currently exist there
1057
00:54:36.947 --> 00:54:39.530
and it was brought in from another place.
1058
00:54:39.530 --> 00:54:44.318
So yeah, it is something we need to be mindful of.
1059
00:54:44.318 --> 00:54:47.160
Okay, we have time for one more question
1060
00:54:47.160 --> 00:54:49.860
before we wrap up this evening.
1061
00:54:49.860 --> 00:54:54.860
And we'll take one from last week's speaker, Steve Gittings.
1062
00:54:54.987 --> 00:54:57.728
What would you guess the Flower Garden Banks
1063
00:54:57.728 --> 00:55:00.000
will look like in 100 years?
1064
00:55:00.000 --> 00:55:03.750
In 100 years, I hope they look
1065
00:55:03.750 --> 00:55:06.600
exactly the way they do today.
1066
00:55:06.600 --> 00:55:10.050
My fear is that through global warming,
1067
00:55:10.050 --> 00:55:12.900
increased temperature, increased bleaching events,
1068
00:55:12.900 --> 00:55:14.730
increased disease events,
1069
00:55:14.730 --> 00:55:18.000
we'll see a community similar to that of today,
1070
00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:21.720
but with lower coral cover, which would be catastrophic.
1071
00:55:21.720 --> 00:55:22.800
It would be devastating.
1072
00:55:22.800 --> 00:55:24.400
It would bring a tear to my eye.
1073
00:55:25.500 --> 00:55:30.500
And it is possible that that is happening and might occur.
1074
00:55:31.200 --> 00:55:35.160
And with the projection of sea surface temperatures globally
1075
00:55:35.160 --> 00:55:37.080
over the next hundred years,
1076
00:55:37.080 --> 00:55:39.240
there's a good chance that that will happen.
1077
00:55:39.240 --> 00:55:42.600
However, there are no guarantees.
1078
00:55:42.600 --> 00:55:44.970
And one of the things about the Flower Garden Banks,
1079
00:55:44.970 --> 00:55:47.370
because they're 110 miles offshore,
1080
00:55:47.370 --> 00:55:49.140
because they are far from humans,
1081
00:55:49.140 --> 00:55:52.890
because they're in deeper water, they do have the chance
1082
00:55:52.890 --> 00:55:55.410
of potentially being resilient
1083
00:55:55.410 --> 00:55:59.280
and resistant to these events
1084
00:55:59.280 --> 00:56:02.640
because of their protections by depth and so on.
1085
00:56:02.640 --> 00:56:05.400
So hopefully we won't see what's happened
1086
00:56:05.400 --> 00:56:06.930
in the rest of the Caribbean.
1087
00:56:06.930 --> 00:56:11.700
But my gut feeling is that the Flower Garden Banks
1088
00:56:11.700 --> 00:56:14.010
100 years from now will look very similar
1089
00:56:14.010 --> 00:56:15.810
to the way they do today,
1090
00:56:15.810 --> 00:56:19.020
but with lower coral cover than we see today.
1091
00:56:19.020 --> 00:56:21.070
My hope is that they won't change at all.
1092
00:56:22.772 --> 00:56:24.420
I think all the staff
1093
00:56:24.420 --> 00:56:26.918
would agree with you on that one.
1094
00:56:26.918 --> 00:56:28.200
Well, thank you Bill.
1095
00:56:28.200 --> 00:56:30.000
If you'll hold on for just a second, folks,
1096
00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:33.660
it's time for us to wrap up the presentation this evening.
1097
00:56:33.660 --> 00:56:35.553
Thank you for attending.
1098
00:56:37.590 --> 00:56:41.460
And thank you for attending this presentation
1099
00:56:41.460 --> 00:56:43.200
on Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks
1100
00:56:43.200 --> 00:56:44.910
from the Inside Out.
1101
00:56:44.910 --> 00:56:46.770
This is the second in our series
1102
00:56:46.770 --> 00:56:49.200
of four presentations that we are offering this month.
1103
00:56:49.200 --> 00:56:51.650
Please be sure to sign up for the remaining presentations
1104
00:56:51.650 --> 00:56:55.140
on February 15th and February 22nd.
1105
00:56:55.140 --> 00:56:56.310
Next week we'll be hearing
1106
00:56:56.310 --> 00:56:57.990
about the early days of exploration
1107
00:56:57.990 --> 00:57:01.770
in the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico from Tom Bright,
1108
00:57:01.770 --> 00:57:03.450
the father of the Flower Garden Banks.
1109
00:57:03.450 --> 00:57:07.080
And in that one photo, he's the person of interest
1110
00:57:07.080 --> 00:57:08.790
in that black and white photo.
1111
00:57:08.790 --> 00:57:10.470
And then the final week, we'll take a look
1112
00:57:10.470 --> 00:57:12.180
at current research and what it can tell us
1113
00:57:12.180 --> 00:57:14.880
about organisms in the deeper, less explored part
1114
00:57:14.880 --> 00:57:17.850
of our sanctuary, the mesophotic zone.
1115
00:57:17.850 --> 00:57:20.670
And this is where something like eDNA comes in.
1116
00:57:20.670 --> 00:57:23.160
So if you're curious what that is and wanna know more,
1117
00:57:23.160 --> 00:57:25.833
definitely check in with us on the 22nd.
1118
00:57:28.290 --> 00:57:30.090
Depending on the number of questions remaining,
1119
00:57:30.090 --> 00:57:32.790
we will attempt to get them answered after the webinar ends
1120
00:57:32.790 --> 00:57:34.770
and then email out responses.
1121
00:57:34.770 --> 00:57:37.050
I see there's just a few, a handful left, Bill,
1122
00:57:37.050 --> 00:57:39.990
so I may be in touch with you to help answer them.
1123
00:57:39.990 --> 00:57:41.820
If you would like to learn more on your own,
1124
00:57:41.820 --> 00:57:44.310
we have provided a document full of resource links
1125
00:57:44.310 --> 00:57:45.930
in the handout pane, as I mentioned
1126
00:57:45.930 --> 00:57:47.640
at the start of the presentation.
1127
00:57:47.640 --> 00:57:49.200
If you haven't yet downloaded it,
1128
00:57:49.200 --> 00:57:51.780
now would be a great time to do that.
1129
00:57:51.780 --> 00:57:54.510
And as always, we welcome your feedback and questions.
1130
00:57:54.510 --> 00:57:56.280
You can submit input by replying
1131
00:57:56.280 --> 00:57:59.550
to the follow-up email you'll receive after the webinar
1132
00:57:59.550 --> 00:58:03.397
or by emailing us at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
1133
00:58:05.068 --> 00:58:07.410
Today's presentation has also been part
1134
00:58:07.410 --> 00:58:10.470
of the National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series.
1135
00:58:10.470 --> 00:58:13.380
While Seaside Chats last just one month each year,
1136
00:58:13.380 --> 00:58:16.560
our national webinar series continues throughout the year
1137
00:58:16.560 --> 00:58:19.320
to provide you with educational and scientific expertise,
1138
00:58:19.320 --> 00:58:20.880
resources and training
1139
00:58:20.880 --> 00:58:23.640
to support ocean and climate literacy.
1140
00:58:23.640 --> 00:58:25.620
Be sure to check the website for recordings
1141
00:58:25.620 --> 00:58:27.390
of past webinars including these,
1142
00:58:27.390 --> 00:58:29.190
we will get them up there eventually,
1143
00:58:29.190 --> 00:58:31.620
and a schedule of what's to come.
1144
00:58:31.620 --> 00:58:34.350
As a reminder, we will share these recordings
1145
00:58:34.350 --> 00:58:37.320
on that website as well as our own.
1146
00:58:37.320 --> 00:58:38.610
It just may take us a few weeks
1147
00:58:38.610 --> 00:58:40.560
because we do send them out for captioning
1148
00:58:40.560 --> 00:58:42.000
in both English and Spanish
1149
00:58:42.000 --> 00:58:44.200
so that we can be as accessible as possible.
1150
00:58:46.110 --> 00:58:49.320
Following this webinar, attendees will receive a PDF copy
1151
00:58:49.320 --> 00:58:52.500
of a certificate of attendance that provides documentation
1152
00:58:52.500 --> 00:58:54.330
for one hour of professional development
1153
00:58:54.330 --> 00:58:57.390
for today's presentation, if you happen to need it.
1154
00:58:57.390 --> 00:59:00.120
This includes our Texas CPE provider number
1155
00:59:00.120 --> 00:59:02.580
for those of you who are Texas educators.
1156
00:59:02.580 --> 00:59:04.680
If you are an educator outside of Texas,
1157
00:59:04.680 --> 00:59:05.970
please use this certificate
1158
00:59:05.970 --> 00:59:08.790
to help get your hours approved in your district.
1159
00:59:08.790 --> 00:59:10.710
And if you require additional information,
1160
00:59:10.710 --> 00:59:14.673
please contact me at flowergarden@noaa.gov.
1161
00:59:15.510 --> 00:59:17.220
There will also be a short evaluation
1162
00:59:17.220 --> 00:59:19.050
following today's presentation.
1163
00:59:19.050 --> 00:59:20.250
Please complete the survey
1164
00:59:20.250 --> 00:59:22.620
immediately after signing off the webinar.
1165
00:59:22.620 --> 00:59:24.600
It should only take about three minutes to complete,
1166
00:59:24.600 --> 00:59:26.910
and we really appreciate any feedback
1167
00:59:26.910 --> 00:59:28.510
you are willing to share.
1168
00:59:30.783 --> 00:59:33.750
Thanks again to Bill Precht for a great presentation
1169
00:59:33.750 --> 00:59:35.610
about Reconstructing the Flower Garden Banks
1170
00:59:35.610 --> 00:59:37.080
from the Inside Out.
1171
00:59:37.080 --> 00:59:38.550
Bill, it was a pleasure to have you
1172
00:59:38.550 --> 00:59:40.050
as our presenter this evening.
1173
00:59:43.170 --> 00:59:44.430
And thanks. Oops.
1174
00:59:44.430 --> 00:59:46.470
Sorry, I have you muted, Bill.
1175
00:59:46.470 --> 00:59:49.070
Did you wanna say any last minute words to everyone?
1176
00:59:49.972 --> 00:59:52.260
I just wanted to thank everybody
1177
00:59:52.260 --> 00:59:54.210
who attended for attending,
1178
00:59:54.210 --> 00:59:59.190
and it was for me this amazing ride down memory lane
1179
00:59:59.190 --> 01:00:02.550
of some of the best dive days I've had in my life
1180
01:00:02.550 --> 01:00:04.680
with some of my closest friends.
1181
01:00:04.680 --> 01:00:07.983
And these are days that I cherish and will never forget.
1182
01:00:09.360 --> 01:00:11.202
Thanks so much, Bill.
1183
01:00:12.450 --> 01:00:15.540
And thanks to all of you for taking the time to join us.
1184
01:00:15.540 --> 01:00:17.463
This concludes today's webinar.