Coral Morphologic presents Coral City Camera

Average visibility ranges from 10-20 feet (3-6m), but because the Coral City Camera is located nearshore in relatively shallow water, strong offshore winds create waves that stir up the sediment on the seafloor. As a general rule of thumb, if there is a NOAA small craft advisory in effect, or surfers are riding waves on Miami Beach, the clarity of the water can be significantly reduced for several days at a time. Winter months bring occasional cold fronts that produce strong winds and waves. Summer months tend to be more calm with generally clear water, but occasional tropical storms and hurricanes may create low visibility conditions for up to a week at a time. Heavy rains will also wash terrestrial sediment into nearshore waters reducing visibility for a day or two. Because the CCC is located along PortMiami, every passing cruise ship will create strong currents that cause brief periods of cloudiness lasting roughly 5-10 minutes before returning to normal. The cruise ship schedules, along with the tide and weather conditions at PortMiami can be found here: http://bbpilots.com/.

Abundant fish activity around the Coral City Camera also produces sediment in the water column. Parrotfish are herbivores that graze algae off the rocks and coral. This diet means that their droppings are loaded with sediment; so much so that parrotfish are one of the primary means of sand production on a coral reef. Grunts and other fish may also be observed hunting for food by scooping up mouthfuls of sand off the bottom in search of edible prey, leaving a trail of sediment behind them as they swim.

One of the research goals of the Coral City Camera is to understand how these ‘urban corals’ live in a high turbidity environment, and to understand if there are changes in fish abundance and behavior that correlate to changes in visibility, weather, and time of year. As a frame of reference, the urban coral nursery frame is located about 9 feet (3m) from the camera.

The Coral City Camera is located in about 10’ (3m) of water on the northeastern tip of PortMiami on Dodge Island in Miami. If you’ve ever left or returned to Miami on a cruise ship, you have passed within a few hundred feet of the camera site. Dodge Island is an artificial island formed in the first half of the 1900’s by dredging material from Biscayne Bay to create the Port infrastructure. The easternmost tip of the Port is fortified by a heavy layer of limestone boulders (riprap) that protect the island from erosion due to constant wave action. These limestone boulders, likely mined from the edge of the Everglades, were only recently placed along the shoreline in 2010. Therefore most of the marine life that you see living around these rocks have self-recruited within the past decade. In addition to natural colonization, the area has also served as a recipient coral transplant site for DERM (Department of Environmental Resource Management of Miami-Dade County) when seawall replacement projects necessitated the relocation of corals that had colonized them. The large concrete blocks visible from the westward camera view were placed there by DERM to serve as substrate for coral transplantation.

The Coral City Camera is meant to be a tool for citizen science and civic engagement with our underwater world. We welcome observations and comments from the public to improve our understanding of what’s happening in the camera’s view. One of our goals is to create a catalog of the marine life captured by the CCC. If you see something new or unusual, please take a screenshot or video recording and paste it in the comments along with the time and date of the observation. If you are a researcher and see an opportunity of how the CCC can be utilized as a tool for science in your work, please contact us at coralcitycamera@gmail.com. We are particularly interested in using technological developments in the field of AI to better characterize the daily variations in fish activity recorded by the camera.

The Coral City Camera is a non-profit project currently operating under the 501(c)3 artist-run organization Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI), so if you find yourself enjoying the view on a regular basis, we welcome user donations of any amount to help operate and maintain it into the future, as well as adding more scientific instruments such as a hydrophone, an above-water weather station, and water chemistry probes.

Corporate sponsorships are now open for the Coral City Camera in 2020. If you represent a company interested in sponsoring the camera, or would like to stream the CCC in your hotel or business, please contact us directly at coralcitycamera@gmail.com.

It is our goal to make the Coral City Camera a multimedia tool for educating people of all ages. With the help of the Bridge Initiative we are partnering with the Everglades Foundation to bring this livestream into Florida classrooms as part of their ecological curriculum that reaches over 100,000 students across the State. As we get feedback from educators and students, we hope to make this platform even more accessible and expand its reach outside Florida. If you are a teacher and have ideas of how you would like to use the CCC in the classroom, please contact us at coralcitycamera@gmail.com to see how feasible it would be for us to help implement them.

The Coral City Camera is not in a public aquarium, and thus there are no glass walls to keep fish contained near it. Fish activity varies over the course of the day, depending on the tide, weather, and water clarity. Sometimes that means that very few fish will be seen, but typically patience will be rewarded, as the fish are rarely far away. Fish life on the reef seems not so dissimilar to being at a dance party. When no one is on the dance floor, people tend to stay up against the wall, but once a few begin to socialize, others will become more comfortable joining them. In our experience, fish activity around the CCC is highest in the late afternoon, and lowest in the early morning.

One of the most critical elements of the Coral City Camera is a wiper that sweeps around the camera’s glass dome every four hours to clean off any sediment or algae that has begun to settle on it. Without this wiper the view from the CCC would quickly be obscured. Occasionally the wiper will stop in front of the camera’s lens partially blocking the scene. We do our best to remotely move the wiper out of the frame by watching the stream in real time, so please be patient.

The Coral City Camera was manufactured by View into the Blue, the same company featured in the acclaimed Netflix documentary Chasing Coral. The camera itself is an advanced surveillance camera capable of being rotated a full 360 degrees inside an optically-clear glass dome. View into the Blue has outfitted this dome with a Clean Sweep™ wiper that automatically cleans the exterior of the dome every four hours to prevent it from being obscured by algae growth and sediment.

The Coral City Camera is powered by solar panels at PortMiami that then transmits the video signal via radio frequency across Government Cut to the Miami Beach Marina where it finally uploads to the internet. Cruise ships may physically block the signal for a few minutes while they are passing between the two radio transmitters. The nearby US Coast Guard station and MB Marina Please may also contribute signal interference at times. If the feed drops out, first try pausing and restarting the YouTube feed or refreshing the page. We do our best to pay close attention to the feed throughout the day to ensure it is always working, so please be patient and kind if there is a service disruption, and know that we will be actively working to restore the video. Keep in mind that the CCC is a free, non-profit service with a limited budget. If you like what you see, feel free to make donations to help us improve the technological capabilities of the CCC. If you represent a company or organization interested in sponsoring the CCC, please reach out to us at coralcitycamera@gmail.com.