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Coral Reefs

This story originally was published by Southerly. Betty Osceola, an elder of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, lives in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, where a small Texas-based oil developer wants to build seven new wells. Burnett Oil Company slipped in its application Jan. 22, days before President Joe Biden signed an executive order pausing new oil and gas leases on public lands. "I wasn’t surprised," Osceola said through a bitter laugh — she knew it would happen eventually. Big Cypress is part of the Greater Everglades and spans 729,000 acres — a size comparable to Rhode Is...

The findings offer the baseline values that can be utilized to judge if nursery-reared staghorn corals have sufficiently strong skeletons for the wild and to match them to regions with environmental situations that optically suit their skeleton strength. The name staghorn coral came from the antler-like shape of its branches, which generates a complex underwater habitat for reef organisms and fish. It is mainly found in shallow waters close to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida Keys, and other Caribbean islands but has dropped by over 97% since the 1980s. Even though restoration ef...

Credit: Mahmoud Omer, University of Central Florida ORLANDO, Jan. 8, 2021 - Florida's threatened coral reefs have a more than $4 billion annual economic impact on the state's economy, and University of Central Florida researchers are zeroing in on one factor that could be limiting their survival - coral skeleton strength. In a new study published in the journal Coral Reefs, UCF engineering researchers tested how well staghorn coral skeletons withstand the forces of nature and humans, such as impacts from hurricanes and divers. The researchers subjected coral skeletons to higher stresses tha...