Researchers Plot Future of Reefs During Annual Coral Spawning in NOAA's Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Byline: Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

KEY WEST, Fla., Aug. 4 (AScribe Newswire) -- Preserving the coral reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary will be much more than a nine to five job for a team of researchers studying this year's coral spawning. In a project funded by the sanctuary and NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program, the team will dive during the night and tend coral larvae during the day as they work on techniques to "seed" declining coral reefs with new larvae. The site where the freighter M/V Wellwood ran aground in 1984 at Molasses Reef near Key Largo provides an ideal location for the seeding experiment. Restored structurally in 2002, the new substrate has not yet been settled by reef-building hard corals.

"The annual coral …