On this Earth Day we celebrate the urban corals of Coral City. Believe it or not, every coral that settled here naturally has done so within the last 15 years.
The limestone boulders that comprise the ‘reef’ here are known as riprap… basically rocks that fortify shorelines against erosion. Fifteen years ago @portmiami needed to fortify their shoreline and used premium white limestone boulders. Physically and chemically ideal for coral growth. Since 2011 they’ve become an extraordinary real world experiment for understanding coral recruitment and adaptation in the Anthropocene. From about 10’ deep the boulders rise steeply up the shoreline to a high berm that protects the crucial @biscayne_bay_pilots station from the open Atlantic Ocean. The strong tidal currents that alternate between clear offshore water and nutrient rich Bay water is perfect for corals and filter feeding sponges. Fifteen years on and twenty five species of stony corals call this riprap home. Many of the oldest brain corals are approaching 30” in diameter. Scores of endangered mountainous star corals (Orbicella faveolata) have settled; many are 15” in diameter and reproductively capable. From Meandrina to Mycetophyllia, Coral City is home. From any reef restoration perspective the site would be considered a resounding success. But it isn’t a reef restoration project, it’s quite literally a byproduct of urban infrastructure. And yet the site shows astounding biodiversity recruitment and stress resilience. It is a glimmer of hope in a sea of bad news. All in all, Coral City is a pretty good place to be a coral, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to have spent the past 6 years studying and documenting the anomalous paradise that your tax dollars built. The Coral City Camera’s motto is ‘Civic Pride Through Biodiversity’ and we’re proud to live in a City where the coral and fish and human co-exist peacefully.
Thank you to @biscayne_bay_pilots@portmiami@noaa_aoml@bridgeinitiativeorg@bfi.miami@kbcfoundation@rescueareef@greatermiamicvb@miamidadederm for the support in making it possible to stream this remarkable marine habitat to into your living room and palm of your hand. #earthday
We are proud to unveil the world’s longest underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 1,000 days through January 28, 2026. This period covers summer 2023’s unprecedented coral bleaching mortality event, and indeed multiple corals can be seen bleaching, but then recovering and growing through 2024 and 2025 into 2026.
Watch 30fps and 60fps versions of the above 10fps timelapse in slides 2 and 3.
Of greatest interest to us is the success and proliferation of the urban strain of staghorn coral native to PortMiami (Acropora cervicornis aka ACER ‘Ventura’). Not only did it not bleach, but has grown swiftly. In just four years, a single branch of ACER ‘Ventura’ has increased thousands of times in biomass, to the point that we now have one of the densest thickets of this endangered coral in the State of Florida!
Just in the past six months, these corals have endured significant extremes in temperature. With our new Aqualink buoy, we recorded late summer temps reaching 90F (32.6C) and recent 2026 winter lows of 60F (15.5C). This represents a huge range of thermal tolerance for this strain of critically important reefbuilding coral, and a reminder that corals grown for nearshore reef restoration in Florida need cold-stress adaptation as well as heat-stress.
Working with our partners at NOAA AOML and University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef, we continue our scientific investigation into the mechanisms of the strain’s resilience, and continue to amplify it for the purpose of restoring Miami’s nearshore reefs.
Of particular interest is observing how dynamic the sediment is at the site. PortMiami is subject to intense currents, magnified by passing ships displacing huge volumes of water. Despite these unnatural conditions, the corals and fish have adapted well to this anthropogenic environment.
After 6 years of near-continuous recording, and nearly 220 species of fish cataloged, there is no underwater coral reef site anywhere in the world that has been as thoroughly recorded and archived! #coralcitycamera #coralmorphologic #miami
Spend a couple minutes sunbathing underwater in Biscayne National Park with our coral fluorescence segment ✨🪸🌞🪸✨
Watch the full episode on Nat Geo, Hulu, or Disney+
#coralmorphologic #biscaynenationalpark
Throwback to one of our favorite WEIRD MIAMI moments on the water 🌊
Colin Foord of Coral Morphologic leading a boat tour through Miami’s luminous, vulnerable marine landscapes. Thank you to Colin Foord for generously sharing your knowledge and guiding us through Miami’s hidden marine worlds on this WEIRD MIAMI boat tour, thank you to Alex Markow for creating this beautiful video, and thank you to everyone who joined us on the water and made the experience so meaningful. ………………………………………………………………………………About Coral Morphologic: Founded by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay , Coral Morphologic fuses science, art, and activism to build symbiosis between people and coral. In collaboration with BFI and Bridge Initiative, they launched the Coral City Camera in 2020—an underwater livestream from PortMiami that reveals the vibrant marine ecosystems hidden beneath the city’s surface. The project was supported by the Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A heartfelt thank you to The Miami Downtown Development Authority (DDA), The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program and the Cultural Arts Council for generously funding the program and helping make this event possible.
We are offering a fresh CM holiday print: a detail of the Colpophyllia natans lower brain coral (LBC) photographed underwater at the @coralcitycamera site. Visit the web store link in our bio to purchase 🪸
We are proud to unveil the world’s longest running underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 926 days through November 12, 2025. This period covers summer 2023’s unprecedented coral bleaching event, and indeed multiple corals can be seen bleaching, but then recovering and growing through 2024 and 2025.
Bleaching occurs when the metabolism of the golden-brown symbiotic algae that live in the coral tissue known as zooxanthellae goes into thermal overdrive. The algae’s production of photosynthetically-produced oxygen exceeds the limit the coral can safely handle inside its tissues, resulting in expulsion of the zooxanthellae (and its brown color) from its host. Because zooxanthellae normally provide a coral with photosynthetically-produced sugars, it begins to starve without these symbionts. Fast-growing corals like the endangered staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and elkhorn (Acropora palmata) lack the energy stores that fleshier corals like brain corals have, and die from bleaching stress much more easily.
Of greatest interest to us is the success and proliferation of the urban strain of staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis aka ACER ‘ventura’) that not only did not bleach, but has grown swiftly to become one of the dominant corals on the site. We look forward to continuing our scientific investigation into the mechanisms of their resilience, and hope to amplify this strain for the purpose of restoring Miami’s nearshore reefs.
Our ability to timelapse the growth of PortMiami’s urban corals highlights the scientific value of the Coral City Camera and its ability to document what was previously undocumented. After 6 years of near-continuous recording, and more than 220 species of fish cataloged, there is no underwater coral reef site anywhere in the world that has been as thoroughly recorded and archived.
We are more than happy to share that the corals at the Coral City Camera site suffered only minor bleaching this past hot summer, showing the resilience we’ve come to expect from them since we deployed the camera 6 years ago. Please enjoy a 365-day timelapse of staghorn coral growth in one of the camera’s views (pardon the image stabilization, the camera sunk into the sand during the summer) #coralmorphologic #coralcitycamera #miami #coralcity
