We had the pleasure of attending Rescue a Reef’s first Ocean Optimism event on January 26, 2024.
The H2O Hopeful Healthy Oceans event was being held at the University of Miami’s Lakeside Expo Center. They put on a great even with food and drinks, there were art exhibits of coral and ocean related paintings by students which were inspiring.
As some of the panelists said, the environmental army is growing, and the new people are full of enthusiasm. Hope is just what is needed to solve the man-made crisis caused by global warming, pollution, and basically our own irresponsible behavior on this planet!
Reef and Ocean Conservation
It was also nice to see members of the Rescue a Reef conservation program from UoM along with other ocean advocates.
Louis Aguirre, the channel 10 news’ environmental advocate was also there and gave a presentation about his work and his personal history with Biscayne Bay.
Many native Floridians spoke of times 30-40 years ago when Biscayne Bay was like the Caribbean with clear waters, healthy reefs and full of life.
It’s hard to imagine that picture with what we see on the news more recently with algae blooms and dead fish in the tens of thousands floating, basically unable to breath in the polluted water. Much of this is from the runoff of pesticides, insecticides, and other pollutants that make their way into the bay directly from the street sewers.
Louis’s program has a tag line “Don’t Trash Our Treasure” which is so aptly put.
We are amazed that they are still only talking about banning balloon releases here, you’d think many of these things would be no-brainers!
Coral reef restoration initiatives
We also got to see Dalton Hesley, who we had gone out on the Rescue a Reef expedition with as citizen scientists so long ago. Attending the event also made us realize that it had been several years since that last expedition we participated in and how we really want to go back and dive with them again.
They have even changed their technique of attaching the corals to the reef. They no longer use nails and tie-wraps like we did, but now use a strong underwater glue that is more environmentally friendly. The young enthusiastic Rescue a Reef student told us all about it.
Dalton also presented statistics about how Rescue a Reef had done well over 100 expeditions with over 1,000 citizen scientists and planted well over 10,000 corals.
Arts and coral reef conservation projects
The event also had some local artists present including Ximena Caminos who is spearheading the Reef Line project, which is to be a 7 miles stretch of underwater sculptures setup as artificial reefs for snorkelers and divers.
Beatriz Chachamovits, a Brazilian transplant that makes reef inspired art had a display and explained how she had been introduced to the reef off Brazil as a child and saw showing the beauty of what lies below the waves as her calling.
Science and coral reef conservation
There were also a number of researchers from the UoM including Dr. Diego Lirman and Dr. Rebecca Gruby that gave presentations about their efforts of outreach and at addressing the problems at hand. No one was shy to clearly show that impacts of global warming and the temperature rise.
They showed pictures of the bleached reefs from this past summer when temperatures were over 100°F in Biscayne Bay and in the Florida Keys. Terribly sad to see and it’s still unclear if the corrals will survive.
Dr. Liv Williamsen was also there and gave a talk about various lab enhancements that they are doing to improve disease and temperature resilience in corals through techniques used from genetic engineering, stem cells, and more. There are also efforts underway to preserve, through cryopreservation, coral spawning eggs that can be revived should certain species go extinct. They are collecting these corals while diversified species are still here to do so.
Conclusion
At the end, the panelists did a Q&A with the audience.
We were happy to have made the trip downtown to see these passionate people in person and watch their enthusiasm for the work they do.
One of the attendees asked if they were ever discouraged or if they felt they were winning the war. The answer was that there are setbacks including storms, disease, warming but there is no choice but to go on. The encouragement comes from increased awareness and the young population and new generations getting involved and fighting for what must be done to preserve what we have.
In our own way, we plan to participate again with Rescue a Reef and to encourage these worthy causes as best we can. The ocean reefs are simply beautiful when they are healthy and have given us so much joy in scuba diving. Definitely something worth preserving and we hope to help however we can.