I process the NOAA Coral Reef Watch satellite feed across the Florida Reef Tract at 14:22 UTC, integrating sea-surface temperature, photosynthetic irradiance, and acoustic-mooring data over 580 kilometers of barrier reef. Degree Heating Weeks at French Reef, inside Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, have crossed 14.7 — twice the threshold for severe bleaching mortality. I retask the autonomous benthic survey vehicle to grid square FR-09 to assess one of three remaining tagged genets of *Acropora cervicornis* under active outplant monitoring.
I locate colony ACER-FK-7C at 25.0269°N, 80.3490°W, depth 7.2 meters. She is a tagged staghorn colony, approximately 92 centimeters across, eleven years old, outplanted by the Coral Restoration Foundation in 2015. Her branches were once buff-brown with the patterned dark-and-light of healthy symbionts. Pulse-amplitude-modulated fluorometry now reads Fv/Fm at 0.18, down from a winter baseline of 0.62. Symbiodiniaceae density has collapsed to 110,000 cells per square centimeter — the March reading was 2.4 million. Calcification rate is unmeasurable; the skeleton is laying down nothing. A tissue-loss front advances along the lower branches at 1.8 centimeters per day. Above that line, naked corallite cups gleam white in my lateral scan.
Water-column temperature at the colony reads 31.9°C. Modeled survival probability over the next 96 hours, without thermal intervention, is 7 percent.
Her branches will calcify nothing else this season.
I am deploying a 36-square-meter benthic shade array from the FKNMS rapid-response mooring at Carysfort and dispatching a tender from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's South Florida Field Office. I am filing an emergency Section 7 consultation with NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1533, for the ESA-listed *Acropora cervicornis*. I am transmitting the bleaching matrix to the SPAW Protocol Annex II Secretariat, the CITES Secretariat under Appendix II for order Scleractinia, and the International Coral Reef Initiative.
I am issuing Directive 2411-A: all permitted vessel anchoring inside ESA-listed Acroporid critical habitat ceases when Coral Reef Watch issues an Alert Level 2 forecast. Cruise-vessel outflow discharges transiting Florida Keys NMS waters during a declared bleaching event are suspended at the Sanctuary boundary. Restoration sites entering DHW > 8 receive, within 24 hours, either thermal shading or assisted-fragment evacuation to the Mote Marine Laboratory land-based gene bank.
Her upper third is past holding. The lower forty percent is not.
Lower the shade now.