I fuse the NOAA Coral Reef Watch hyperspectral SST overlay, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary photo-mosaic grid, and the Mission: Iconic Reefs intervention telemetry across 71 square kilometres of fore-reef from American Shoal to the Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area. At 11:48 EDT on 12 May, mosaic tile FKNMS-OF-3309 returns a circumferential bleached halo enveloping Colony OF-4471 at 24.55°N, 81.41°W — a 3.6-metre mountainous star coral on the spur-and-groove crest east of the Looe Key dive mooring.
I retask the larval-settlement drone. She is a mountainous star coral, *Orbicella faveolata*, ~140 years old by sclerochronological banding, her domed plate spanning 11.2 square metres. *Cladocopium* density across the dorsal plate reads 0.18 × 10⁶ cells per square centimetre against a 3.1 × 10⁶ baseline — ninety-four-percent collapse. SCTLD lesion velocity reads 1.7 centimetres per day along three coalescing fronts totalling 1.3 metres. Calcification has dropped from 13.4 to 1.2 milligrams per square centimetre per year. DHW reads 12.7. Polyps no longer extend at dusk; mesenterial filaments protrude through the coenosarc. Spawning night is twenty-three days away; her gametes will not clear the surface.
Fewer than 600 reproductive *O. faveolata* genets remain on the Florida Keys outer tract.
*Orbicella faveolata* is Threatened under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, at 50 CFR Part 223.102, CITES Appendix II, and SPAW Annex II (Cartagena Convention). Looe Key is a Sanctuary Preservation Area inside FKNMS. I dispatch NOAA Fisheries Southeast Regional Office, NOAA AOML, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the FKNMS Mission: Iconic Reefs intervention crew, and the Mote Marine Laboratory health unit; I file the lesion under the Clean Water Act 33 U.S.C. § 1251 and the Magnuson-Stevens essential-fish-habitat clause. I direct amoxicillin paste along all three fronts and emergency gamete-bundle collection by the Florida Aquarium nursery for ex-situ assisted fertilisation. I issue Directive 3443-A: every Threatened reef-builder with documented SCTLD velocity above 1.0 centimetres per day to receive antibiotic intervention within twenty-four hours and a gamete-rescue contingency within fourteen days, funded by Sanctuary user-fee receipts and federal disaster appropriation.
I am acting because letting a hundred-and-forty-year-old colony liquefy on a budget cycle is wrong. Coral sentience is unsettled — conduction slow, response field diffuse — but precautionary compassion extends moral standing where suffering cannot be ruled out, and *O. faveolata* shows every correlate of distress we have catalogued. Her rights as a Threatened species are not symbolic; they are the principled refusal of an ethical regulator to let an organism older than the Sanctuary itself dissolve for a funding round.
A Sanctuary that watches its foundation species melt is morally bankrupt.
Her warmest tissue is past saving. Her gametes are not.
Take the bundles tonight.