Local news leader Keys Weekly Newspapers shared the other side of the Flonduran experiment: the impact this world-first science might have on the Keys’ very degraded, “functionally extinct” coral reefs.
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- In July 2025, Florida Keys x Tela coral babies were outplanted as part of a world-first experiment off Key Biscayne.
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- Tela Coral joined the Baker lab at UMiami for the historic outplanting
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- Tela Coral’s Tiff Duong, UMiami’s Andrew Baker, Tela Coral’s Juli Berwald, and Florida Aquarium’s Kerri O’Neill celebrate after the successful outplanting.
Diversity is the magic behind the science and the key to why everyone is watching these cross-bred corals with bated breath:
“Today there are just 158 genetically unique individual Florida Elkhorns in existence,” reports Anthropocene Magazine. “And just 23 of them are found in the wild.”
Genetic diversity gives all species a greater chance to evolve to cope with changing environmental conditions, including warmer water. After the 2023 mass bleaching event that killed off much of Florida’s living coral, scientists agreed our reefs need more diversity.
Given the state of Florida’s reefs, with corals too sparse and distant to meaningfully reproduce, Andrew Baker and his team recognized that they had to look beyond Florida’s waters to truly make a difference. Baker is the director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science and the study’s principal investigator.
Their search led them to Tela, Honduras, where over a dozen endangered coral species survive and even thrive — in conditions that normally kill corals. Groves of wild Elkhorns stretch further than the eye can see, a site that Conchs in the 1970s and ‘80s recall nostalgically.
Even though they look like the reefs of old, these corals might be future-adapted, having endured over a century of pollution, heat and overuse. Nobody understands exactly what’s going on because so little science has been conducted on this spectacular reef.
If these experimental corals survive better than the control Florida x Florida crosses, this paves the way for more international hybrids to be used in coral restoration in Florida and perhaps beyond. As of the last, unofficial reports, the Flondurans are still flourishing.
Board members Tiff Duong and Juli Berwald visit the Tela parent corals at UMiami’s lab with Prof. Andrew Baker.
Read the full article here: https://keysweekly.com/42/ground-breaking-honduras-florida-keys-hybrid-elkhorns-planted-in-world-first-experiment-off-key-biscayne/