On Friday June 10, St. Petersburg College’s Underwater Research Society, more succinctly called “Scuba Club,” departed the Clearwater campus in a caravan of two college vans and four cars for the six-hour drive to Key Largo for a three-day trip to learn about coral reefs.

On Saturday morning, the 30 students, along with two instructors, boarded a dive boat and headed out from John Pennekamp State Park to dive two coral reefs in the park. “The water was clear and the divers got to see large rays, several small sharks, and a host of colorful fish and coral,” Oceanography Professor Heyward Mathews said.

Later that day, the group toured Coral Restoration Foundation, a coral restoration lab on Key Largo, where they learned about the group’s efforts to replenish coral reefs by taking small broken pieces of corals and propagating them out in the shallow waters. “They hang these small pieces of hard corals on a PVC Christmas Tree until they are up to the right size, then local divers take them out and use a marine epoxy that will set underwater to hold the new coral to the limestone foundation of the reef” Mathews said. “This is a really innovative way to reverse the world wide loss of living corals resulting from sea level rise and the slow warming of the world ocean.”

Before heading home on Sunday, the group set off on two dives: one at the most famous dive spot in the county, the Christ Statue, and another at a shallow reef called the Minnow Cave. “Everyone was a bit tired but totally thrilled about the experience of diving on living coral reefs,” Mathews said.

The students left contemplating returning in the fall to help with the coral planting. “No PowerPoint presentation can really take the place of seeing these fantastic marine communities first hand,” Mathews said.