Abstract
This article intervenes in disaster media research by investigating the complex system of mediation that is required to mitigate coral disease and to monitor coral rescue and care. Stony coral tissue loss disease, discovered in 2014, has rapidly infected more than 50 percent of the Florida Reef Tract, the only living barrier reef in the continental United States. In response, reef managers have established a coral rescue team tasked with carrying out a phased coral rescue plan. In conjunction with that plan, the Coral Rescue–Coral Monitoring Dashboard interface and a corresponding Coral Rescue photo series hosted on Flickr were launched in 2019. This article explores the Dashboard and the Flickr photo series together as a single form of media introduced and discussed as “intermediation monitoring.” As a dynamic human-animal interface where coral tissue emerges, the Dashboard materializes coral agency and instantiates protocols for care: collection, gene sampling, and preparation for housing and transport to land-based aquarium facilities. The article further demonstrates how complex systems can be connected to one another—Dashboard to photos, technological system to the system of living things, and complex coral systems to human systems—in order to produce the mutually constitutive human-animal relationship between corals and humans as caregivers across the corals’ lives. Also emphasized are the ways that digital animal-human interfaces can be used to enact disaster relief.
Highlights
This article intervenes in disaster media research by investigating the complex system of mediation that is required to mitigate coral disease and to monitor coral rescue and care
On a recent volunteer coral restoration dive trip in Key Largo, I spent an afternoon tying finger-length staghorn coral fragments to a Coral TreeTM, a PVC pipe structure suspended between the ocean floor and the surface
After a morning of training at the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF) Education Center, I completed two ocean nursery dives, attaching corals taken from a genotyped crate of staghorn coral fragments to a corresponding tree
Summary
The careful planning and nurturing are paying off: during the August 2020 full moon, nursery-raised staghorn coral outplants were observed spawning in the wild and were documented for the first time in the Florida Keys (REEFocus 2020) This spawning event further opens the door to large-scale restoration of the Florida Reef Tract, a 358-mile barrier reef running along the Atlantic a Deborah James is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Governors State University. Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) was first observed in 2014 Since it has rapidly spread both north and south, infecting much of the Florida Reef Tract (figure 1), the only living barrier reef in the continental United States. Speaking, if “disaster media” “names the project of attuning to ways that media are both complicit in the amplification of disastrous occurrence and helpful in the provision of reckoning and relief, support and succor” (Parks and Walker 2020), the use of mediated means to study and intervene in coral health on Florida’s Atlantic coast constitutes an instance of disaster media that inclines toward disaster relief while raising important questions of human-nonhuman relationships of care
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