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Florida reefs are in trouble. Could the answer lie in coral from the Caribbean?

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Florida reefs are in trouble. Could the answer lie in coral from the Caribbean?

Cailyn Joseph, a PhD student in Andrew Baker’s lab, organizes brain and elkhorn coral in Honduras before the trip to Miami.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School


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University of Miami Rosenstiel School

MIAMI — Off the northern coast of Honduras, thick stands of endangered elkhorn coral have mysteriously defied warming oceans fueled by climate change to blanket the reef with healthy, cocoa-brown colonies branching toward the water’s surface like antlers.

Reefs near the small colonial town of Tela have more than three times the amount of live coral found elsewhere across the Caribbean.

Now scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School hope to unlock that secret and crossbreed the sturdier coral with Florida elkhorn as they work to buy more time for a shrinking reef battered by rising ocean temperatures and disease.

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Brain coral, left, and endangered elkhorn coral on a reef near Tela, Honduras, grow in water where temperatures hover around 88 degrees.

Brain coral, left, and endangered elkhorn coral on a reef near Tela, Honduras, grow in water where temperatures hover around 88 degrees.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School


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“Usually we associate reefs with crystal clear water and lovely temperatures. These are rough, tough reefs,” said Andrew Baker, a Rosenstiel coral biologist leading the research. “There are enormous stands of elkhorn corals and great coverage of other corals. It’s kind of a mystery why the corals are doing so well.”

In Florida, and around the planet, oceans absorb more than 90%of additional heat trapped by greenhouse gas. The extra heat is decimating reefs. Record heat last year triggered a global bleaching event, marking the second in just a decade. In Florida last summer, coral turned a ghostly white when a blistering heat wave caused them to spit out their life-sustaining algae and bleach.

Rising ocean temperatures around the planet are endangering coral reefs, that bleach when water remains hot for too long. But near Tela, on the northern coast of Honduras, coral are thriving in hotter, more turbid water. Scientists hope to breed them with Florida coral to produce more resilient offspring.

Rising ocean temperatures around the planet are endangering coral reefs, that bleach when water remains hot for too long. But near Tela, on the northern coast of Honduras, coral are thriving in hotter, more turbid water. Scientists hope to breed them with Florida coral to produce more resilient offspring.

Manuel Chinchilla/iStockphoto/Getty Images


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With waters around the state hitting record highs again this summer, Baker and a team of students flew to Honduras in May to scout out what he hopes could become the parents of new, more resilient Florida coral.

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At 4 a.m. one June morning they rose to be on the reef at daylight to collect the coral. Once packed in wet paper towels and sealed in bubble wrap, Baker and his team loaded the coral into six couch-sized coolers to be whisked back to Miami aboard a donated Amerijet cargo flight.

Fabrizio Conejo, a PhD student in Andrew Baker's lab, takes notes on elkhorn found on a Honduran reef.

Fabrizio Conejo, a PhD student in Andrew Baker’s lab, takes notes on elkhorn found on a Honduran reef.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School


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University of Miami Rosenstiel School

“It’s been a long day,” Baker said 14 hours later, standing on the tarmac at Miami International Airport waiting to clear customs as the evening sun turned the sky pink.

Baker’s biggest worry was temperature. Pilots set the cabin temperature to 77 degrees. But 14 hours is a long time, even for sturdy coral. Baker was confident the two species of brain coral would survive the trip, but he was less certain about the elkhorn.

Andrew Baker, left, removes coral from a reef near Tela, Honduras. Healthy elkhorn coral, right, are critically endangered around the world.

Andrew Baker, left, removes coral from a reef near Tela, Honduras. Healthy elkhorn coral, right, are critically endangered around the world.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School

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“For those elkhorn corals, the ones we’re actually most interested in, they are notorious for not traveling well,” Baker said.

Amerijet workers have shipped whales, dolphins, and even giraffes in the spacious Boeing 767 freighter jets but never coral. They quickly ferried the coolers through a warehouse as big as six football fields to a waiting truck for the half-hour drive to tanks outside Baker’s lab alongside Biscayne Bay.

A forklift at Miami International Airport moves coolers containing elkhorn and brain coral shipped to Miami from Honduras in June.

A forklift at Miami International Airport moves coolers containing elkhorn and brain coral shipped to Miami from Honduras in June.

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Clouds of mosquitoes mobilized as the students and Baker unloaded the coolers for the moment of truth.

“All right, here we go,” Baker said as he cracked open the first cooler. “There’s that smell.”

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A sweet salty scent, like sea scallops, wafted out, signaling they’d survived being packed in a cooler for hours, bumped around on forklifts and jostled by airport workers.

Within a day, after most had acclimated to their new home, the coral were moved from the outdoor raceway tanks to an indoor spawning facility. Altogether 37 colonies of elkhorn and brain coral made the journey. To improve the chances for success, Baker gave seven elkhorn to the Florida Aquarium where scientists have been successfully breeding coral.

Coral Reef Futures Lab Manager Cameron McMath places places elkhorn coral into an outdoor runway tank to get acclimated after the trip from Honduras.

Coral Reef Futures Lab Manager Cameron McMath places places elkhorn coral into an outdoor runway tank to get acclimated after the trip from Honduras.

Diana Udel/University of Miami Rosenstiel School

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Diana Udel/University of Miami Rosenstiel School

This is the first time coral have been brought into the U.S. to attempt breeding more resilient babies, Baker said. The idea of using foreign coral to do this has raised concern over mixing genetics. Still the concerns don’t outweigh what’s at stake: Elkhorn that once blanketed Florida reefs have nearly disappeared in the state. What remains was hit hard by last summer’s heat wave.

It took a year just to obtain permits to bring the coral into the U.S. , Baker said. If he succeeds at breeding them, he’ll need to secure more state and federal permits to plant them on Florida’s reef. Baker hopes to have the coral spawn in July or August, when Florida coral typically spawn. He can then cross-breed them and have babies growing while he works through the permitting process.

Baker ultimately hopes he can fasttrack an evolutionary process now being outpaced by climate change.

“We can’t just wait for that solution to be ready and then think, ‘Okay, now what do we know now?’ What do we do to save these ecosystems?” he said. “We’ve got to work now, to have something left to save by the time we fix this bigger problem of climate change.”

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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