The Kimberly's Reef documentary project is generously funded by Bodil & George Gellman with additional program support from Howard K.

& Nancy B. Cohen.

Off the coast of Southwest Florida A reef is growing where none existed before.

Can a few pieces of concrete on the Gulf floor help unlock the answers to some of our greatest environmental challenges?

Born from loss.

Built for science.

Driven by hope.

This is Kimberly's Reef.

[Splash] Coral reefs attract loads of admirers to their underwater world, both human and otherwise.

Our coral reef is an immensely diverse ecosystem of not just corals, the coral animal and all the associated animals and fish and, invertebrates, lobsters and crabs and all the organisms that live on the reef, but the incredible diversity of these coral reefs is like the underwater rainforests of the ocean.

Coral reefs also play a critical role in our lives.

Corals are vital to maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

They provide sources of breeding grounds, foraging grounds, refuge, um, and a variety of other ecosystem related services and functions to marine life.

These coral reefs are the nursery for many of the fisheries, the important fisheries, that we either like to fish for or we eat anywhere around the world.

Because it hosts all that life, that life can be used to develop new medicines.

Ah, so, it has biomedical uses it supports habitat for fisheries, and also tourism.

So, they provide a large amount of economic benefits.

And coral reefs can provide protection for people living near water.

They provide a buttressed or a first line of defense for wave energy from storms and hurricanes and such.

So, they, they've been shown to actually break down as much as 90% of the wave energy before they get to shore.

But coral reefs are in rapid decline around Florida and the Caribbean.

Coral reefs are facing a lot of different stressors these days.

A whole multitude of challenges.

One of the major ones is increasing temperatures from ocean warming, as well as lower pH from ocean acidification.

So, our oceans are becoming more acidic.

They're facing disease outbreaks on major scales.

and they also face stressors from local sources of pollution or, um, you know, things like anchor drops and just general destruction to the reef.

So, they're just going through it these days.

In fact, extremely high temperatures in 2023 and 2024 caused corals in Florida and the Caribbean to bleach.

Coral bleaching is when they get too hot and too stressed that they kick out their symbiotic algae that gives them their color.

So, they look white like their underlying skeletons.

That's why it's called bleaching.

And if it stays too hot for too long, the corals will die from that stress.

And that is what happened in the lower Florida Keys.

In 2023, there was a marine heat wave that essentially caused the functional extinction of two of our most important framework building coral reef species: the staghorn and elkhorn coral.

They're the predominant branching coral species that we see in Florida.

And every time we see a decline, a precipitous decline in the abundance of one of those species, the magnitude is, is quite severe.

And you have to understand that throughout the world, the coral reefs only take up, I don't know, 2% of the ocean floor.

And yet they're responsible for more than 25% of the diversity that we see in the reefs.

So if we lost our reefs completely, we would lose the nurseries, lose the places for all these organisms to live.

And the oceans would become a much more barren seascape.

But there is hope.

People around the globe are working on solutions to not only protect and restore corals, but to mitigate the challenges faced by this essential ecosystem.

The Coral Health and Disease Research Program studies all of the different stressors that corals are facing.

And then what makes some corals more resistant than others?

We have the coral restoration program that studies and really does the hard work of outplanting corals on the reef.

and we work together to help decide a science based strategy for outplanting corals on the reef.

So this is where I think habitat support structure, artificial reefs, manmade interventions can really play a role.

Because we need to be able to replace the habitat that's been lost.

Habitat is just one of the purposes for Kimberly's Reef.

Kimberly's Reef is an underwater laboratory, an underwater classroom, for FGCU students, FGCU faculty, and for our local residents and visitors.

Launched by The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University in 2023, Kimberly's Reef is an artificial reef in the Gulf off the coast of Southwest Florida.

Not only is it a platform to study for marine science students and professors, but we have art students and professors involve, people from the business school, education, journalism.

And so it's a great place that we can bring all these different disciplines together to study coral reef health, marine life health and the threats that these organisms and these reefs are exposed to.

This artificial reef isn't just about science.

The whole concept of being focused on the role that we have in a life, and being able to leave a legacy in some small way of improving mankind, is really a big thing.

And I think that's what this reef will do.

Southwest Florida isn't the Florida Keys.

Different water.

Different challenges.

While we don't have the typical tropical reefs that you see in the Keys out in the Southwest Florida waters, you do actually still get corals.

You get some reef structures.

There are some soft corals, so things like sea whips and sea fans.

They can grow really large and they can be important on the reef.

But they're not the ones building like the hard skeleton that's going to build your, your beautiful coral reef.

And because they're along that coast where we have these river impacts, they have a lot more variability in their water quality.

They have, you know, more exposure from our coastal communities than maybe the Florida coral reefs, where they have a little bit more mixing with the Atlantic Ocean nearby.

So, it's a very different environment than what we see in Florida's coral reef.

So how can a research reef off the coast of Southwest Florida actually make a difference?

And what did it take to bring Kimberly's Reef from concept to the Gulf?

We start by understanding the geography and the flow of water around the Florida peninsula.

Florida's coral reefs are a 300-mile tract along along the east coast, down pass Key West to the Dry Tortugas.

It is the only living barrier reef in the continental United States.

It is adjacent to the Florida Current, a warm, clear ocean current that flows through the Straits of Florida.

The current transports heat and marine organisms, and eventually joins the Gulf Stream, which then carries water northward along the east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean.

In a way, the current flushes harmful nutrients away.

The western and southern coast of Florida are an extension of a broad, submerged platform called the Florida Shelf.

So, you can think of the Florida peninsula with this kinda like, very kind of shallow um, boundary around it which is our shelf.

And then as you extend out to the outer shelf, it gets to depths of like 150 meters, 200 meters.

But, then it just drops off into thousands of meters into the deep Gulf.

Once you get past the West Florida Shelf, you have the Loop Current that basically brings water in from the Caribbean.

And it can upwell waters up onto the shelf, cooler, deeper, nutrient-rich waters that will move towards Kimberly's Reef so we can study that process, understand it better, and how it may influence Kimberly's Reef and other processes nearby.

To the east, you have the freshwater inputs.

They bring in nutrients, as well.

Nutrients can be a really good thing because all plant life and algae depend on that.

And they're the base of the food web.

They're the food for everything else.

Oddly, the vast expanse of the western shelf and what is in it is not well known.

I think people assume that it's just sand, and the sand goes hundreds of miles offshore and there's nothing that lives in it, which isn't really true.

Nothing in the Gulf is a truly blank slate.

Even in a sand or mud habitat there is life.

But the sites that have a hard bottom have a especially diverse community of life with a lot of interesting structure and high abundance of fish and invertebrates.

To encourage more diversity of wildlife, artificial reefs are used to augment the hard bottom.

So, artificial reefs are structures that could be man-made materials or natural materials that are intentionally placed in the marine habitat to build habitat for fish, and also generate economic benefits for the people who, ah, use them.

[Honking from a boat] The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission Artificial Reef Program has placed more than 4500 artificial reefs along the entire Florida coastline.

These reefs can provide habitat restoration and coastal protection.

But mostly, artificial reefs are meant to attract wildlife.

So, we can come in and construct some of that vertical relief and provide for the fish, what they need for growth, reproduction and shelter.

So, you get the succession of things that come into the reef almost immediately.

And then the little things come in that draws the bigger things, that that draws our recreationally and commercially important species, things that people want to catch out there on the reefs.

And in Florida, fishing supports a multi-billion dollar tourism industry.

[That's a keeper.]

People moved down here.

They built houses down here, to come down for the favorable climate.

Come down here for the world-class fishing.

You've got multi-generational families that run charter boats.

You've got tackle shops.

You've got boat builders that are based here.

And largely, that's because the fishing is so good here.

And a lot of that depends on those artificial reefs.

So, it's a major economic driver, and it, it mobilizes them and motivates them to get out on the water.

[My gosh.]

Tracking these commercially important fisheries is the core focus of most research done on reefs.

But there is so much more we don't know.

So, artificial reefs go in the water.

There's structure there.

Fish like structure because stuff grows on it.

Small fish eat that stuff or hide in the stuff that grows on it.

Bigger fish come eat them.

We come for the bigger fish.

We eat the bigger fish.

So, is that true?

[Chuckles] Does that actually happen?

How does that happen?

What rate does that happen?

What happens when there's these big events that happen, hurricane, harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, when there's no oxygen?

What happens when there's a lot of fresh water coming coming out of the estuary?

How does that affect what species are there?

Does it outcompete other species?

Are there changing of food webs?

Are there more toxins entering the food web?

Um.

What is pollution doing?

All, these are all questions that we don't know.

So.

The idea for Kimberly's Reef was born from these questions and a series of environmental disasters that brought Southwest Florida into an unwelcome spotlight.

On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon Offshore Drilling Unit exploded off the coast of Louisiana triggering the largest oil spill in U.S.

history.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a massive algae bloom, so-called red tide is nearing the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Red tide blooms are persisting in Florida.

Toxic red tide blooms have increased.

As massive Hurricane Irma batters Florida on a path up the Gulf Coast, Governor Rick Scott today advised.

Lee County residents were still evacuating their homes early this morning from Hurricane Irma, and local shelters.

Well, we're seeing some of that storm surge really impacting southern Collier County.

Scientists found blue-green algae again in Southwest Florida waters.

The toxic algae has been plaguing beaches on the East Coast for weeks now.

Experts say this could get worse on both coasts because of the summer heat.

The financial losses in Southwest Florida from fishing and tourism were in the billions.

Responses from federal, state, and county governments increasingly prioritized water quality and the reduction of nutrient pollution.

Restoration and research programs expanded, funding collaborations among scientists, universities, government agencies, and private partners to better understand and repair damaged coastal ecosystems.

I think that became the point in time when people started focusing more resources on Southwest Florida, because they realized that we were kind of the test kitchen for what was going on with climate change and a thousand people moving here per day, The way that these changes are expressed may be different in a particular location, but the drivers are the same: climate, ah, capacity for people on the landscape, the infrastructure needs, and the nutrients that people bring when they move to a landscape, the changes in land use patterns that get rid of wetlands and natural systems that tend to buffer these kinds of extreme events and make, um, our place here in Southwest Florida a very, very high quality of life.

So, we are a microcosm of a global system.

Florida Gulf Coast University was already working on many of these issues.

In 2019, they opened The Water School.

[Woo!]

as part of the growing network of research universities dedicated to this environmental effort.

And one of the things we focus on heavily is, ah, hands-on experiences, learning science by doing science.

And whether that's taking our students out on a oceanographic research vessel, um, having them at our Vester Marine Lab every Friday morning in a semester, to be out on the water or in the lab, learning about our local watersheds.

[If you hold it in your hand, here] or taking them to the Florida Keys to actually snorkel on reefs down there and go out on boats to learn about that kind of a reef system.

It was only natural that an artificial reef could add to the hands-on approach.

One of the big motivations for Kimberly's Reef and deploying the reef were some of the environmental impacts and disasters that we unfortunately experienced over the past 15 years.

And for all of these, we were really caught flat-footed.

And what I mean by that is we didn't have good baseline data that we could measure against to see how these impacts were affecting the marine life in our coastal waters, out on the West Florida Shelf.

Launching any artificial reef isn't simple.

This research reef had more obstacles than normal to overcome.

To get an artificial reef approved is a long process.

So conceptually, we are always kind of thinking about where we might want to put something, what the reef material might be.

Over time, we've learned a lot more about the different kinds of materials that are compatible with the ocean environment.

And we've learned a lot about where we should and should not place those materials.

And sometimes the reef material that we use to make the reef was ultimately bound for the landfill.

So, we get to repurpose that into something amazing.

The details of where and what are meant to help protect fragile ecosystems and to prevent hazards to navigation.

Then, there are the necessary permits.

It starts with communicating with the regulatory agencies, Ah, regardless of where you are off the state of Florida, you're going to need a, an Army Corps, ah, permit.

That's for federal authorization.

And when you're operating in state waters, you'll, in addition, need a state permit from the Department of Environmental Protection.

So, when we initially did the permit, we actually created this plot off of Bonita Beach, eight miles offshore.

It's an 11-acre plot.

So, it's a pretty decent sized plot, especially when you're underwater.

That's, that's quite a big area.

We picked this site so it'd be easy to get to for our classes, for example.

And 30 feet of water, it's an easy dive.

And it's good to have something close to the shore so you can really see how the biology responds to the changing water conditions.

But the project was abandoned due to a lack of funding and a lack of hurricane-proof materials.

A year later, new donors gave seed money to start again.

Dr.

Parsons and I worked together for a number of years.

And I think he needed some of the tenacity and some of the pragmatic aspects outside of the university to really bring this to bear.

So this next time when we took the, ah, this reef project back off the shelf, ah, we needed to update the permitting as well as do fundraising.

And we saw that it had changed.

And what had changed in this permitting was that now these five-and-a-half foot large openings were required in any reefs that were being deployed for sea turtles to be able to swim through them.

And so, that's when we started pursuing, ah, culverts and trying to find a supplier of culverts.

Because, you know, they're giant cement boxes, basically.

And so they'll be able to hold up to wave action, and hopefully, they won't move around at 20,000 pounds.

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 put the project on hold once again, but the search for cement culverts continued.

I, ah, Googled infrastructure one day and Oldcastle Infrastructure came up.

And when you went down the website list, it just happened that Cape Coral came up as the first precast company that they had in the state.

And just looking at this was awesome.

There were these 19 amazing culverts.

[Chuckles] We call them amazing culverts, ah, right there on their facilities.

The rectangular drainage culverts were slated for destruction.

Instead, Oldcastle donated them for the reef.

Typically they would be broken, taken to a crushing operation and made back in the road base.

You know, nothing's ever wasted.

At least this is something you can see, something you can touch, something for the future.

[Music] [Applause] I want to thank all of you for what you're doing, not just for FGCU, but what you're doing for Southwest Florida.

Donations of every kind were instrumental in moving this research reef into the Gulf.

The primary funder was Eric Rieseberg.

This reef was really a team effort.

It took, I would say, hundreds of people to get this up and running.

The donations, ah, for this reef came from many, many people across the United States, ah, not only here in Florida, not only from my family, etc.

The retired health care executive was already working out his childhood passion for marine science at FGCU's Vester Field Station.

[That's quite a shot there, that's beautiful.]

I would do things from power washing ah, to installing stainless steel sinks that needed to be replaced, which was always a joke because I have a couple of advanced degrees in things like epidemiology and what have you.

And do you know that it only takes three times to really get it right when you're an epidemiologist to install a, a sink correctly?

Um, because the faucets wouldn't work the first and second times.

The idea for a research reef had a broader appeal for him.

I want to see people come from all parts of the world and the United States and come to FGCU and with their heart pounding, can't wait to get to the Water School on a Wednesday, can't wait to get to Vester on a Thursday, and get out on the boats on the reef on a Friday, um, and, you know, get their feet wet, literally and figuratively.

And be able to see, ah, the growth of sponges, be able to see the growth of certain, um, reef fish and populations, be able to see ah, the growth of different corals.

And at the same time doing good things for humanity and cleaning our environment.

The name he chose for the reef was closer to his heart.

Kimberly, ah, is, ah, my deceased daughter.

Ah, she died many years ago.

And one of the things that I don't think is oftentimes spoken about when one loses a child um, is that not only do you lose the child itself, but you lose all the things that you hope and wish and expect that your child to, to have as they go through their life.

I felt that we should be able to provide something of purity, something that would continue to serve humanity and social improvement, something that was happy in spirit, and something that everyone can share.

This is not Kimberly Rieseberg Reef.

This is Kimberly's Reef.

She's a symbol of all of the other young children in the world that pass, and pass much, much too early.

The FGCU Research Reef: Kimberly's Reef was now ready for the Gulf.

Suddenly we had a whole new, a whole new vision.

We had a whole new expectation of what these 11 acres, you know, on the bottom of the Gulf could look like.

The plan was to deploy the culverts in the fall of 2022.

Nature had other plans.

[Howling winds] Category 4 Hurricane Ian made landfall on September 28th, 2022, devastating homes and businesses throughout Southwest Florida.

Hardest hit were the coastal towns of Naples, Sanibel Island, and Fort Myers Beach, with storm surge reaching up to 18ft.

A mile from the Gulf shore, FGCU Vester Field Station was wrecked.

Years of research and collections were lost.

Really, the damage that we're seeing was all about storm surge.

We see very little wind damage.

The first thing is just sorting through what we can keep and what needs to be thrown away.

Yeah, unfortunately, we did lose some samples.

So we had chest freezers that had fish that we collected that we're looking at the toxin levels in the fish.

But the effort and the time is also lost in that.

So, it'll take a while to get everything up and running.

The company hired to deploy the culverts experienced extraordinary destruction.

Ah, Hurricane Ian kicked our butt.

This beach yard went under 12 to 14 feet of water.

There was a shrimp boat sitting right here where it floated up.

So we would be about ten feet underwater where we're at right now.

And some of our barges were pushed up, even though they were spudded down, were pushed up on this bulkhead.

Kelly Brothers Commercial Marine Construction is located on the backside of Fort Myers Beach, an area that took the brunt of the storm surge, incoming and outgoing.

Half of Fort Myers Beach and some of their debris and department stores we had all through here.

And we just start, went to work, started cleaning it up.

Below the surface, the Gulf bottom also was devastated.

And what we saw was a lot like a bomb had gone off down there.

You could see that there were signs of a huge physical disturbance, some sites where the rock had been exposed and covered in life, were now buried in sand and looked like a barren desert.

Whereas other sites had been scoured down to the sea floor and limestone was exposed where it had been covered in sand before.

Students and professors were able to explore the havoc after the storm from a Florida Institute of Oceanography research vessel, which had been scheduled to be in the region before the hurricane churned up the Gulf.

Vis was terrible.

Ah, in fact, ah, it was, it was kind of scary ah, diving, especially the first site that we, ah, dove, which was pretty near the Caloosahatchee and ah, was so murky I could hardly see see my hand in front of my face.

And the sea was quite rough then.

It was a, a cold front after the storm.

Ah, so going down the anchor line, ah, was just like descending into midnight blackness.

Naturally, the deployment for Kimberly's Reef would have to wait.

Far as timing and the weather that becomes that's the biggest deal for this type of project.

To deploy the culverts, rain is not the concern, but wind.

We are utilizing that crane, the HC 80, to load them, as you can see, onto a 140-foot barge.

We go out to the Gulf.

We're exposed.

We're nine miles out.

We need to be on point timing the weather.

You know, you can't be out there in large seas.

Timing the weather where you have a long enough period of calm weather and not a front moving through, so even if you do have a mechanical malfunction, something happens, you still have time to get back and get your crews to safety.

So, my brother Travis, he will schedule everything around a weather window and everybody has to be ready.

Okay, there's a gap.

You shoot the gap, do all the work and get back in safe.

[Music] To prepare for that gap, 18 culverts at the Oldcastle cement yard in the nearby town of Cape Coral were transported two at a time on a flatbed truck 38 miles to the Kelly Brothers' beach yard on Fort Myers Beach.

There they sat as the entire reef team waited for the call.

[Have one of these guys.]

So please tell me, what are we doing here today?

Today is our first deployment of culverts that will be making up Kimberly's Reef.

FGCU's Research Reef.

Wednesday, March 1st, 2023, six months after Hurricane Ian, the perfect day for deployment had finally arrived.

You know, the, ah, the planning and getting to this stage was a lot of hard work by everybody.

Some frustrations, some delays.

Um, so it'll be nice to finally get this in the water.

Team members, along with local news crews, piled into boats at Vester to travel out into the Gulf to witness the event.

Meanwhile, at Kelly Brothers, the culverts were loaded and ready for their plunge.

The barge will back up, meander through the bridge, go out in between Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Causeway, that it heads about nine miles offshore for this reef site.

Go out there, spud down, get into position.

There will be a buoy marks ahead of time, check the GPS coordinates, then drop three box culverts.

Move to the next location.

Do it all over again.

So instead of just deploying these off the barge with the machine and just dumping them, they're actually having to be set in specific locations and certain distances apart.

Each one of those white buoys marks what we call the module.

So the module will be three culverts.

So they have six culverts on the barge right now.

Three of them will be placed at module one.

The other three will be placed at module four.

The weather's not going to be good tomorrow, so and they can only do six in, in one day.

So, we'll see when the next ah, set of modules go out.

The other 12 culverts were deployed two months later with less fanfare.

Helen Noble and Eric Rieseberg were there to mark the completion of Kimberly's Reef.

It was exhilarating to see how quickly and efficiently Kelly Brothers worked at getting them, on chains and, and lifted down, getting them in the water.

It was certainly a a dream come true.

I was actually, ah, at peace.

I think that was the, ah the best term.

We had finally done it.

[Heavy sigh] That sense of peace was shared by others.

It was no pun intended, but it was a heavy lift.

It was a relief to get it in the water.

On the other hand, now our work is just beginning.

The design of the research reef is not random, but intentional, a controlled experiment in itself.

the way we're laying out Kimberly's Reef will allow us to examine various physical processes.

Plus you have that hard elevated area for sponges, for corals, for seaweeds.

And so, you increase the diversity of life that's out there, that increases the complexity which has actually been shown to improve the resiliency of the environment.

So, what we mean by that is it can heal faster.

So, if we have more diversity, we create a more robust system.

The six reef modules were nicknamed “villages.” It's set up where we have each village is basically technical replicates.

So, we have three culverts so that you can study them and know that you have some sort of reproducibility.

And then there's six villages overall.

The villages are in different orientations.

So, some of them face east, west, some of them face north, south.

Um, all of that was by design.

The first point of study was what happens once life begins inhabiting the villages.

One of the things we wanted to do right away was to be able to capture what it was like before, um, and how putting the artificial reef in changed it.

Because we're just starting the reefs take a really long time to like fully mature.

There's some studies that have shown, like, it may take ten years for them to kind of get to their peak successional levels in terms of, like, the overall diversity and things that are colonized on them.

To study that ecosystem up close, everyone needed to be certified for SCUBA.

Then learn scientific diving.

The scientific diving course is named that, but it's a bit of a misnomer because we really have to work on the safety part first.

Getting people underwater who may not have been underwater in a while.

[Splash] Making sure that they're conducting dives safely, so then we can focus on the science.

Especially because scuba diving in the Gulf is not like diving in the Florida Keys.

It's not always going to be flat.

It's not always going to crystal-clear blue water.

Get used to being in not the best conditions.

And if we need to go do it, we're going to go do it.

We're going to go sample.

Like, we still need to be able to do the job underwater.

Right away, the team began monthly visits to the reef to perform various surveys.

We'll start with our water quality measurement.

So, we take YSI profiles, so we can look at differences in temperature, salinity, pH, just kind of like what's the water like on a given day?

We also take nutrient samples.

So, collecting water to see how much nitrates are in the water, how much phosphates.

Those can be indications of pollution.

And they're food, basically, for phytoplankton.

And then usually our dive team will get in the water.

[Splash] Usually there's a team that's doing the benthic surveys and a team that's doing the fish surveys.

One aspect of it is trying to look at how the artificial reef brings in other species.

And so part of that is Macy's project and looking at the really small things of, like, what has the potential to grow.

Macy Noll was one of the first FGCU students to do research on the reef.

An art and biology major, Noll's project was to discover the wildlife in the water column by learning what settled on clay tiles.

We are hoping to see, um, both microscopic organisms and macroscopic organisms.

So, we want to see fish.

We want to see, um, sedentary organisms that will adhere to the surface of the clay, like corals, like oysters, and those kinds of organisms.

There are things that we'll colonize first.

Usually, it's like bacteria or like microfilms.

Then, other things will come and colonize.

And so, we see things like sponges and tunicates, um, and a lot of encrusting macroalgae.

To encourage colonization, Noll and her FGCU art professor created clay art for a few of the villages.

The project is called “Domesticating the Reef.” It's about moving in the furniture.

It's about decorating the walls.

It's about making the space more habitat friendly.

So, the idea with this project was not to create some beautiful sculpture was meant to be looked at, right?

It's meant to help these organisms take hold and grow and flourish.

And hopefully, you know, in a couple of years, these structures will be completely covered over and we won't be able to see them at all.

And we will have accomplished our goal in that.

Early on, researchers found some surprises.

Because I've been studying it for a while to know that we have very high diversity.

Like the stuff Macy was doing, there's stuff that I never expected.

The stuff I didn't even know that lived in Florida.

Like we found little, tiny sea spiders, which are this, like, small group of arthropods, um, that live entirely underwater.

I've only heard of them living in, like, Antarctica.

And we have baby ones on Kimberly's Reef.

And wildlife did a little redecorating of their own.

Fishes and also stone crabs like to excavate under the reef where it lies on the, ah seafloor.

And they've actually kicked the sand and mud away from the reef and exposed the underlying limestone rock, which is almost creating or revealing another reef around the footprint of the artificial reef that we've placed.

When I first dove the reef pre deployment, there was nothing there.

All we saw was like scallops and like shell hash.

So, remembering those first dives to what it is now is kind of crazy that humans created this beautiful ecosystem.

Student Kinzie Pruitt was tasked with identifying the new residents as they moved onto the reef.

The ultimate goal, at least my part of the ultimate goal, is to sort of create a field guide for future research assistants, future students who are working on this project to allow them easier identification of the fish, as well as teach them how to determine certain metrics.

The early counts were easy.

The maximum number of species I found at a single village has been around 13 to 15.

And those are the villages that we deployed first.

During the first three years, Pruitt continued counting as fish either stopped by for seasonal visits or made Kimberly's Reef their home.

In the past year, we see a lot of snook now living on the reef and a lot of Goliaths that hang out there.

Occasionally we see more pelagic species, such as cobia and Spanish mackerel that like to move around a lot more.

But the ones that live there tend to be the the typical players we see, like sheepshead,ah, mangrove snapper.

Almost three years after deployment, I kind of expected to stop seeing species that I had to go look up.

But there was like a little fish, and I was like, I don't know what that is.

And it ended up being a bandtail puffer fish.

And I've definitely seen a huge increase in species abundance on the reef.

The richness has gone up.

There's, I think, a total of 39 different species.

So, it's been cool to see the increase, like, firsthand.

The first three years also saw the long hoped for corals.

Some of the corals that we're finding on the reef include knobby star coral.

We're also finding robust ivory bush coral, which is wonderful because it forms branches that are a good hiding place for fishes.

We're finding tube coral, ah, which also has little branches that are a good hiding places for organisms.

I think we're excited to see them because that means the reef potentially has the capacity to get bigger.

Um, and so Kimberly's Reef would continue to grow.

So they're providing kind of like a framework or a nucleus.

Life had taken hold.

But in the Gulf, nothing exists in isolation.

Everything from water quality to temperature to currents shapes what survives and what doesn't.

The team began to focus their research on the key stressors affecting Gulf waters: pollution and water flow.

With Kimberly's Reef in the water, we could then address some really important questions that we're dealing with.

Does red tide affect corals?

Does red tide affect sponges?

Do fish leave the reef during a red tide?

Do they come back?

How does discharges from the Caloosahatchee River affect the corals and sponges on a reef?

How long does it take them to recover?

If there's a hurricane, how much damage is caused by a hurricane to the reef organisms?

How long does it take to recover?

So these are the kinds of questions that we're addressing and hopefully getting answers to through our research.

Red tide toxins exist in nature, but nutrients from the Caloosahatchee River can fuel intensive blooms, which can impact the health of marine life as well as humans.

Scientists at FGCU were already investigating that connection before Kimberly's Reef was deployed.

A lot of what we're studying is trying to sort of trace that pollution that leaves the estuary and find out what happens to it then.

So we've got studies that are collecting the particles that fall from the surface down to the bottom to see if some of the, um, algae that sinks to the bottom might be ah, staying and changing form and turning into nutrient pollution that can come out of the bottom.

The dark water can block light.

And so if you have all of these things that are relying on sunlight to grow, having that plume water come over could be potentially detrimental.

One of the ways the team is studying Red Tide or Karenia brevis is through chemistry.

Marine chemistry is very important to study, in general, because it affects the marine life and, organisms living around there.

As well as those organisms affects the marine chemistry.

Plus, when it comes to the food chain, it ultimately comes to us.

We're determining, um, how much toxins are in the water and how much are getting to the bottom and seeing if there's any disturbances or any correlation with the fish, versus toxins and other contaminants.

The team uses PVC pipes to trap sediments in the water column.

And we as you can see, we are processing those samples to extract, ah, toxins out, out of those, ah, sediments.

By studying the concentration levels, Doctor Pusupa Adhikari and undergraduate Isabel Kacprowski hope to learn where and how long red tide toxins can survive in Gulf waters.

[This is the sample that we collected from one of the sediment samples that we got from] I think to try to minimize the production because, ah, cleaning the ocean is not an easy thing.

Ah, and ah, if they stay, settle down to the sediments, they stay there long enough, and can stay there as long as, ah, 80 to 100 years.

So, they can resuspend back, come back to the water column when there is a tropical storms and they can even impact organism even there is no, ah, bloom.

In fact, red tide blooms were rare in the first three years of Kimberly's Reef.

So, studies have suggested that red tide might be dormant off coast.

So, dormant in lower level waters.

Kacprowski, now a graduate student, expanded her research to study animals called pen shells.

They live on the Gulf bottom and are often found on the beach after storms.

My graduate research is focusing on how red tide toxins are interacting with the sediment, as well as bivalves, in this case, pen shells.

And how red tide toxins might increase with sediments over time and location.

How pen shells might be accumulating these toxins if there is any toxins, ah, when there's not a bloom.

And seeing how all that interacts with the, ah, benthic environment.

We are also looking at some other pesticides, um, how they affect those reef organisms.

Those information will be helpful for the regulatory agencies.

Like the research from Kenzie Pruitt, who also continued her studies into graduate school.

She discovered evidence of a form of pesticides called pyrethroids in water samples from the Gulf.

We're obviously very close to the water.

So everything that we do has sort of a direct impact on our coastal waters, including artificial reefs near shore such as Kimberly's Reef.

So that's kind of the main idea of my study, is to figure out if certain pesticides from mainly residential sources are impacting our close shore habitats, and therefore, are they hurting the fish?

She found that some fish tissues did show evidence of pyrethroids.

But her results only lead to more questions.

There's higher concentrations of total pyrethyroids in fish livers than their gills.

And in their, in their muscles, which means they're not really storing it long term in their muscles.

Their gill exposures pretty short.

And then it seems to be getting passed through to their liver to detoxify pretty quickly.

And there's so much more that I didn't think about when I was designing this study.

Like, for instance, if a fish takes a pyrethroid up through their gills and then I kill it, obviously I'm going to see it in the gills.

But if a fish takes a pyrethroid and then a few weeks later is the week that I sample and then kill that poor fish, maybe it'll be higher in the liver.

So there's like so many different factors that I hadn't thought about that I'm learning this is why science is hard and not everyone does it.

Chemistry is only part of the research.

The team is also studying the physical processes around Kimberly's Reef.

The currents, the tides, and the effects from storms.

We're interested in the amount of mixing and turbulence.

So it turns out for a lot of organisms like corals, they need turbulence because that turbulence mixes, ah, nutrients towards them.

If there was no flow, they would consume all of the nutrients around them and then they would starve.

So they need some kind of flow to continually bring them nutrients and not only flow, but, ah, turbulent mixing type of flow, because one of the big issues we have here in Southwest Florida is hypoxia from freshwater plumes that are in the top of the water.

In 2025, the FGCU physics lab anchored acoustic Doppler equipment within the reef complex to measure the turbulence and speed of the local currents.

These instruments work by sending out an acoustic ping at a certain frequency, and then they measure the frequency that gets bounced back.

One acoustic Doppler mechanism quantified the amount of nutrients or sediment material floating from top to bottom in the water column.

If there's very few particles in the water column and you send out an acoustic ping, not very much is going to be reflected back.

So, you're going to have a ah, soft or a low response.

If there's lots of particles in the water column, you'll get a big response.

And, and we measure it in decibels, just like you measure sound that we hear normally with our ears.

So we can see things like, um, phytoplankton migrations that happen over the course of the day.

And then also when it's really windy, you get lots of suspended sediment, so we can look at resuspension on the reef.

After a year's worth of study and no tropical storms, the results were mixed.

We found that there wasn't as much mixing as we had expected.

It turns out the currents are not particularly strong there.

And so you need, ah, either stronger currents or more of a current share to develop ah, large scale turbulence.

And perhaps next time we'll go with some other instruments that measure on a much finer spatial scale.

He's planning on putting three of them out, kind of in a triangular fashion around the, the reef itself.

So we can see as waves are moving in what their velocity is and how it changes, or how water flow changes as it moves across the reef.

Measuring waves at Kimberly's Reef helps researchers investigate the largest impact: storms.

So we have a spotter buoy, which is very cool.

These are little, like floating buoys that sit at the surface, and they transmit data in real time.

And so, the array that we have collects whatever sensors you have on there, um, data from the bottom, the surface, and then kind of at mid-depth.

Right now we're just looking at temperature and wave height and wind speed.

And the reason this is so crucial is because those subsurface temperatures, um, the energy through the heat down there is what creates either a strong storm or a weak storm.

Historically for Southwest Florida, we, we don't have any buoys out there.

There's one down in the Keys.

There's one up at Sarasota.

And then USF has a couple of buoys, but none of them measure subsurface temperature.

And many of them don't measure waves as well.

Stronger storms are why FGCU hopes to add even more spotter buoys to further explore the West Florida Shelf.

Well have a few more inshore buoys like Kimberly's Reef, and then we'll have some mid-shelf and outer shelf buoys.

And this data will feed directly into, um, these oceanographic models and into the intensity models.

And so it will give the National Hurricane Center the Hurricane Research Division, more data.

Uh, so that we here in Southwest Florida, hopefully we'll have a more accurate intensity forecast.

[But there are a number of factors at play.]

We're also interested in these deeper water temperatures because of red tide.

When you have these cooler upwelling waters coming up from the loop current and offshore in the Gulf that can stimulate red tides.

This is also coupled with gliders that we're in the process of acquiring.

They're basically underwater drones that will be making similar measurements below the surface and adding more data to this larger network that we're involved with, an ocean observing system that's national, international.

It's really a global reach.

And so we're working with other universities and agencies in the Gulf, up the east coast of the United States, elsewhere in the Caribbean, elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, to collect these data, to better predict hurricanes, to better understand red tide and other harmful algal blooms.

So, it'll be a really important component, in addition to this larger network.

After three years, funding for the deployment of Kimberly's Reef and the preliminary research was nearing its end.

So I like to think of what we've done so far as establishing a pretty solid baseline, ah, for all of the future work that we're going to do.

When you start a project, you usually have a small pot of money that you start with, collect the data, working with your students, get some results that then lead into more complicated questions, larger projects, asking more questions, collecting more data, gaining a better understanding of what's going on, and really building a whole program and making kind of a global or all encompassing view of the reef in this case itself, and all the processes and organisms that are involved there.

The team began building the case to expand on their discoveries.

One potential project brings us full circle.

We actually have quite a few grant proposals that we've put in right now.

Ah, the one that I'm the most excited about was kind of this idea of just, can we use Kimberly's Reef as a artificial reef to restore corals?

And we value the corals in themselves because in many parts of the world, including the nearby Florida Keys, they're declining at a shocking rate.

Ah, so the fact that at least some species of coral seem to be happy colonizing and making this artificial reef their home is, is really exciting for us.

And so we kind of got this idea of what happens if we were to take corals and plant them on Kimberly's Reef, you know, maybe being a refuge for some of those corals that are going to be particularly threatened and see how well they do in this area.

Because if climate changes how currents are circulating or things are warming, there may just be this natural progression of corals from the Florida Reef Tract up into our region.

Kimberly's Reef isn't being used just for research.

It's an opportunity to share, to teach and to expand its reach beyond the Gulf.

Like the student project by Zoe Szabo using virtual reality.

So, I want to be the first to welcome you to my project IMMERSIA-VR, um, which is using underwater 360 video to create immersive experiences in scientific diving.

But what does that actually mean?

Basically, I'm trying to bridge the gap between people caring about the environment and actually understanding it.

Just kind of showing people a mechanism to say, ‘why should I care about this?

I know what the ocean is.

I know what scuba diving is.

I know what reefs are.'

But they've never been in it.

And being able to put them in the headset and have them do a short dive and then really.

and have them do a short dive and then really, 'okay, I get it now.'

We have a huge senior population.

A lot of folks aren't able to go on these kind of intensive dives.

But if we can connect them to these places right off the coast where they live, that's a huge conservation tool.

Um, we're connecting hearts and minds with resources.

And that's what really moves the needle in terms of conservation.

Kimberly's Reef is also going into the classrooms of the next generation.

So, for schools, depending on grade level, we're creating teacher lesson plans with interactive digital clips and short video clips to open up the mysteries to the Gulf marine environment.

And to reach more students, we'll use a portable planetarium to bring students into a 360-degree immersive underwater adventure.

From a simple concept to a complex ecosystem, Kimberly's Reef is no longer just a series of cement culverts placed in the Gulf.

So if you recall, we said we had 19 culverts and we dropped 18 of them in the water.

So now we're bringing the 19th culvert on campus for on-campus awareness.

But the excitement lies in what's ahead.

And I'm thrilled for the scientists and for the students in the long term.

And that was what the goal was when we first sank this reef.

Ten years from now, 20 years from now, we'll still be telling the story of Kimberly's Reef.

But it won't be about the early days.

It'll be about the experiments we're doing there.

It'll be about the unique ecological communities that are living there.

And it will be about that rich and rewarding experience that students have diving on that reef.

It's been a really great ride watching the whole process with Kimberly's Reef.

Coming from a vision back in 2018, 2019 to getting it in the water in 2023.

Now, three years later, it's an active, flourishing reef.

It's really become part of our culture here at The Water School.

And this isn't the end of the story.

It's only the beginning.

[Music] So this is Kimberly's Reef, but in reality, it's every other child's reef.

And we hope that people take advantage of it.

The Kimberly's Reef documentary project is generously funded by Bodil & George Gellman with additional program support from Howard K. and Nancy B. Cohen.