Abstract
Environmental compliance monitoring associated with the Port Miami dredging project (2013–2015), designed to assess the impact of project-generated sediments on the local coral community, fortuitously captured a thermal bleaching event and the first reports of an emergent, highly contagious, white-plague-like coral disease outbreak in the fall of 2014. The disease, now termed stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), has decimated reefs throughout Florida and is now spreading across the Caribbean. The high prevalence of disease, the number of affected species, and the high mortality of corals affected suggests SCTLD may be the most lethal coral disease ever recorded. Previous analyses of the dredge monitoring data have reached mixed conclusions about the relative impact of dredging on coral mortality and has often parsed out disease susceptible individuals to isolate the impacts of dredging only. We use multi-variate analyses, including time-based survival analyses, to examine the timing and impacts of dredging, coral bleaching, and disease on local coral mortality. By examining the status of corals monthly from the October 2013 to July 2015 observational period, we found that coral mortality was not significantly affected by a coral’s proximity to the dredge site or sediment burial. Instead, coral mortality was most strongly impacted by disease and the emergence of SCTLD during the monitoring period. During the 2-year monitoring period, 26.3% of the monitored corals died, but the only conditions significantly affected by the dredge were partial burial and partial mortality. The strongest link to mortality was due to disease, which impacted coral species differently depending on their susceptibility to SCTLD. The focus on disturbances associated with dredging created a circumstance where the greater impacts of this emergent disease were downplayed, leading to a false narrative of the resulting mortality on the local coral communities. The results of this study reveal that while local events such as a dredging project do have quantifiable effects and can be harmful to corals, regional and global threats that result in mass coral mortality such as thermal stress and disease represent an existential threat to coral reefs and must be urgently addressed.
Highlights
In November of 2013, the Miami Harbor Phase III Deepening Project began with the goal of making Port Miami the first of four eastern seaboard locations in the United States to allow access to larger post-Panamax class vessels
We examined how dredging, bleaching, and the first reported outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) influence the survivorship of the corals monitored during the 21-month Miami Dredge project where 162 out of 615 (26.3%) corals died
Our results clearly show that dredging and the impacts of local sedimentation had an impact on the partial mortality of individual coral colonies, but importantly, did not have a significant impact on the total coral mortality over the 21-month monitoring period
Summary
In November of 2013, the Miami Harbor Phase III Deepening Project began with the goal of making Port Miami the first of four eastern seaboard locations in the United States to allow access to larger post-Panamax class vessels. In addition to estimating the impacts of local dredging sediments on corals during the 21-month monitoring period (Dial Cordy and Associates Inc, 2015a,b), the monitoring program happened to captured two key events: (1) a regional thermal anomaly in the summer of 2014 that resulted in the worst coral bleaching episode recorded in Florida since 1997–1998 (Kennedy, 2014; National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, 2014, 2015a; Gilliam et al, 2015, 2016; Manzello, 2015; Lewis et al, 2017; Walton et al, 2018; Neely et al, 2021a), and (2) the appearance of a white plague-like disease outbreak at the southernmost Port Miami far-field control monitoring sites in September and October of 2014 (see Dial Cordy and Associates Inc, 2015a,b; Precht et al, 2016, 2019; Precht, 2021) This was the first reported case of a new emergent coral disease epizootic called stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD; Florida Coral Disease Response Research, and Epidemiology Team, 2018).
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