Mote Marine Laboratory has expanded its coral reef restoration efforts to grow more coral fragments from more species than ever before with help from a successful donation program developed by a Key West-based water-sports company.

Leaders from Fury Water Adventures, which began the donation program in March, met with Mote recipients today, Nov. 22 to celebrate Fury’s total donations of more than $21,200 to date. Fury is donating 50 cents from each ticket for their snorkeling trips to Mote’s Coral Reef Restoration Program and encouraging other businesses to start similar donation programs for the benefit of coral reefs, which are vital to Florida’s economy and ecosystem health.

“As President of a company that uses our ocean as a resource, it’s important to me to give back to the marine environment – it’s simply the right thing to do,” said Scott Saunders, President of Fury Water Adventures. “I chose Mote as a conservation partner because they’re a leader in coral reef restoration. Mote is a trusted and worthy organization with an impressive track record of doing great things for our oceans. I’m proud that Fury can help, and I hope our business community and leaders in the Keys will do the same. We all depend on this resource and the reefs need our help.”

Due to multiple threats, live corals in the Caribbean cover an average area of just 8 percent of the reef, down from more than 50 percent in the 1970s, according to a report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in September 2012.

To help reefs recover, scientists at Mote’s Tropical Research Laboratory on Summerland Key have raised thousands of coral fragments, including threatened species, in land-based and underwater nurseries and planted many fragments in the wild during multi-partner efforts to restore degraded reefs. These efforts depend a great deal on support from sales of the Protect Our Reefs specialty license plate administered by Mote (www.reefplate.com).

This year, Mote matched the Reef Plate funds it received for coral restoration with monthly donations from Fury.

“We’re extremely grateful to Fury for their generosity, which has gone a long way to help our nonprofit Lab meet and exceed its goals of coral reef restoration,” said Dr. Michael P. Crosby, President and CEO of Mote. “Coral reefs are incredibly important as both vital marine ecosystems and as a keystone of Florida tourism. When the water-sports community makes a strong effort to give back to our reefs, that means a lot to us at Mote.”

So far in 2013, funds from Fury’s snorkeler program have helped Mote expand its land-based coral nursery on Summerland Key to include 12 new raceways for growing coral fragments, boosting the number of brain coral and star coral fragments in that facility from about 800 before Fury’s monthly donations to 3,000 today.

Funds have also helped Mote expand its offshore nursery near Looe Key, where corals are grown on monofilament lines dangling from underwater PVC “trees,” from about 5,000 before the donations to 12,000 today. The nursery has added new fragments of staghorn and elkhorn corals, both threatened species, and has begun to add star, brain and boulder corals.

“We’ve been working for years to culture the branching corals, staghorn and elkhorn, which are listed as threatened by the Endangered Species Act, and now we’re also increasing our efforts with other species that are important for reef structure,” said Dr. Dave Vaughan, Executive Director of Mote’s Tropical Research Laboratory. “We did some of the first-ever work culturing brain corals, star corals and other boulder-like species for restoration over the past few years. Now we’ve ramped up from hundreds to thousands of these fragments with help from this new funding support.”

The Fury program, which continues to donate each month to Mote, will also help the Lab expand future restoration projects in the Lower Keys and Key West during 2014. – See more at: http://www.thefishingwire.com/story/305182#sthash.xc6brWEo.dpuf

Image courtesy Mote Marine Laboratory