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Show Me the Receipts: Why I.CARE Monitors Every Coral It Plants · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  We've been talking a lot about coral restoration this week.
• 0:02
  If you haven't listened to the other episodes before you wanna
• 0:04
  listen to this one, you might wanna go listen to the other ones.
• 0:06
  We talked specifically about an organization called ICARE,
• 0:10
  ICAREaboutcoral.org is the website.
• 0:13
  Now, this is a coral restoration organization that's takes fragments of
• 0:18
  a coral and rebuilds them in a nursery and then puts them out into the ocean.
• 0:22
  We talked a lot about their method yesterday in yesterday's episode, but
• 0:25
  today we're gonna be talking about why they monitor 100% of their specimens
• 0:30
  that they put out into the ocean.
• 0:32
  That's not normal.
• 0:33
  Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they planted, maybe 20%.
• 0:38
  But ICARE checks on all of it, like 100%.
• 0:40
  That single decision made before ICARE, was planted its first coral, and is the
• 0:45
  reason why people keep giving money.
• 0:46
  It matters more right now than ever because the funding ICARE and groups
• 0:51
  like that depend on is generally at risk.
• 0:54
  So we're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How
• 0:56
  to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 0:57
  We're getting into why monitoring 100% is a good case scenario for
• 1:01
  people who fund this type of stuff.
• 1:03
  Now, as we said yesterday, the funding model for ICARE mainly is about divers
• 1:08
  who go at the dive shop at Key Dive, and they spend an extra two bucks
• 1:12
  for every $100 dive that they do.
• 1:14
  And so that funds the coral restoration efforts, or part of the coral
• 1:17
  restoration efforts that ICARE does.
• 1:19
  So Mike and Dr. Kylie Smith, who is the co-founder.
• 1:23
  They're both are the co-founders.
• 1:24
  But from the very beginning, before ICARE ever put its first coral in
• 1:28
  the water, Mike and Kylie built in a rule that shaped everything else
• 1:33
  about how the organization will run.
• 1:35
  Every single coral outplant that gets checked at fixed intervals, one week,
• 1:39
  one month, 90 days, then one, two, and three years, with no substitute
• 1:44
  and no coral left unaccounted for.
• 1:47
  This wasn't necessarily like the standard practice elsewhere in the industry,
• 1:51
  at least not in the Keys at that time.
• 1:54
  So like others were like doing 20%, maybe 30%.
• 1:57
  And that's, like to be honest,
• 1:58
  from a scientific perspective, you wanna look at a portion of it.
• 2:01
  To do all of them, if you're planting like, thousands of oak plants, well then
• 2:04
  maybe you're not gonna be able to do it.
• 2:06
  But they decided to do 100%, which I think is admirable.
• 2:09
  I think is really, really admirable.
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  ' Cause the alternative approach, you know, checking a random sample of oak
• 2:14
  plants and reporting that sample as if they're representative of everything
• 2:17
  else planted, was like the norm Mike said he saw around him in the field.
• 2:22
  He rejected it on the grounds that a spot check of a fifth of what's actually in
• 2:28
  the water can't tell you the truth about what's happening in the other four-fifths.
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  And representing it as if it could misrepresent the real outcome
• 2:35
  of the people funding the work.
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  So his hero of the story wasn't the reef.
• 2:39
  His hero of the story was the people who were funding the work.
• 2:43
  It's the funders.
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  He had this mission to ensure that they knew what was happening and
• 2:48
  they knew the restoration of the coral, whether it was good or not.
• 2:52
  Whether it worked out or not.
• 2:53
  'Cause let's be honest, when you're restoring something, it's
• 2:55
  not always going to be 100%.
• 2:57
  You're not always going to be 100% successful.
• 2:59
  You are working in coral reefs that have already seen damage.
• 3:03
  They've seen disease, they've seen climate change impacts like increasing
• 3:06
  heat of the surface of the sea and even the bottom of the sea, like everywhere.
• 3:09
  Everything is bad.
• 3:10
  Ocean acidification happening.
• 3:12
  We're seeing more fresh water in the water in general, sea level
• 3:14
  rise, all that kind of stuff.
• 3:15
  It is crazy.
• 3:16
  It is nuts to see what happens.
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  So you're never gonna get a full 100% success rate,
• 3:20
  especially with fragging corals.
• 3:21
  It's not gonna happen.
• 3:22
  But monitoring that mattered.
• 3:24
  It mattered enough to build an entire organization around it.
• 3:26
  Like Mike frames full monitoring as a matter of fiduciary duty, the
• 3:31
  same obligation he'd expect from anyone handling someone else's money.
• 3:35
  Whether it's $2 dive add-on or a large donation.
• 3:38
  If donors and dive customers are funding actual coral survival, not
• 3:42
  just the act of planting the coral, but the group owes them the real number
• 3:46
  rather than the flattering estimate.
• 3:48
  If I'm paying $2, I don't wanna just know that you're doing the work.
• 3:51
  I wanna know if it's successful.
• 3:53
  Because there's nothing worse than saying, "Yeah, I gave two bucks.
• 3:55
  I kinda had to when I did the dive.
• 3:57
  It was for the fragments." And somebody's like, "Well, does it work?" I don't know.
• 4:01
  I mean, I see reefs out there, but it's not like… It's just, it's not perfect.
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  It's not wall-to-wall as it wouldn't be because these are coral fragments.
• 4:08
  So like, you wanna know.
• 4:09
  It's like, "Oh, actually, yeah.
• 4:10
  They send me a report.
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  I've spent two bucks, they send me a report like every month or every year,
• 4:14
  whatever they do, and I get to see how successful their work is, and I've only
• 4:17
  paid two bucks." But it makes me want to pay more because I know they've invested
• 4:21
  in it because they share the data.
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  They survey, they monitor 100% of the corals that are planted.
• 4:28
  Like, that's crazy.
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  So for Mike, like skipping full monitoring would have let, like, ICARE quietly
• 4:34
  avoid ever reporting a bad outcome.
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  There's biases in sampling.
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  We know this as science.
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  We have to remove the bias.
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  So when you technically say you have 100 corals, and you're like, "I'm
• 4:43
  gonna take a representation of 25. I'm gonna monitor 25 of those corals."
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  And it could be across species or it could be like, for each species.
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  So say you have one species and you're gonna do 25 of them out of 100.
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  Now, you're not gonna do it in all the same area, 'cause if you do it all in the
• 4:57
  same area and that's a successful area, you're gonna say, " We know we've had
• 5:00
  75% success rate." But if I go diving and I'm a funder and I go diving and I
• 5:04
  don't go in that area, I go in the other area, I'm like, "Well, hold on a second.
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  I see, like, these corals, they're dying.
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  Like, these are little frags and they're dying.
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  Why?
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  Like, 'cause they just look like pieces of rock that are cemented on with epoxy.
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  Like, that's you guys are doing this, but you told me that there
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  was, like, a 75% success rate." Well, that's because this one area
• 5:20
  that we surveyed, that was the rate.
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  Now, normally what you would do is you take the 25, but you would go all over
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  the place, like your entire study area, so that you can see how they're all doing in
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  your entire envelope of your study site.
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  So you can do that from a 25% rule, right?
• 5:34
  25 of 100.
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  But if you did all 100 and you started to look at it and you
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  said, "Hey, yeah, you know what?
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  We actually have a 47% survival rate." That's what they're producing 47%.
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  The tracked across, like, 17 coral species ICARE works with.
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  You know, a figure Mike considers is strong, and one he notes few
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  practitioners in the field can even produce, since it depends on tracking
• 5:55
  everything rather than a sample.
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  So what he's basically alluding to is that some organizations will say,
• 6:00
  "We have a higher success rate," but they're not looking at everything.
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  So they're kinda hiding some of the failure.
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  And look, it's science.
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  You have failure.
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  This is why having somebody like Dr. Kylie Smith as the co-founder and the scientist
• 6:11
  on the board, they kinda look at that and say, "Look, we gotta take the bias out."
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  It's not just a matter of, like, we're taking funding in.
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  We have a duty to that funder to say, "Yes, this is working," or, "Hey, we
• 6:21
  haven't had, like, the success that other people have, but we're monitoring
• 6:24
  everything." We're not taking sub-samples.
• 6:26
  And you can even say, if I took a sub-sample over on the left side here, I
• 6:29
  can say that 90% of the coral survived.
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  But if I look over on the right side and I just take those, I can
• 6:34
  say that, like, 25% survived, just in the way that they were doing it,
• 6:37
  and we're looking at why that is.
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  But if I said, "Okay, 47% survived," it'd be like, "Oh, that's kinda
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  low." But then, like, when you look across, we looked at everything,
• 6:44
  and here are some of the reasons.
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  The conditions over on the right side had maybe a little more nutrient runoff or
• 6:49
  more algae or something like that, and then the ones on the left side didn't.
• 6:52
  But we're seeing an overall 47% success rate, which is great.
• 6:56
  And so I think that's what's missing from a lot of these reports.
• 6:59
  A lot of these, Like, I was at our liquor store, LCBO.
• 7:02
  And they will ask for donations.
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  Like, you pay for your booze, and then they say, "Oh, hey, do you wanna
• 7:08
  add $2 onto the SickKids Hospital?"
• 7:10
  Well, yeah, sure.
• 7:11
  No problem.
• 7:12
  It's two bucks.
• 7:13
  I can do it.
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  Now, I have no idea how this money is being used.
• 7:17
  I can probably go on a site, they can probably give it to me, and
• 7:19
  I can see how it's being used.
• 7:20
  But right from then and there, I don't know how it's being used.
• 7:23
  But if I go to a dive shop for ICARE, like, Key Dive, which is one of ICARE's
• 7:28
  dive shops that funds it, and I say, "Hey, I'm giving you this two bucks.
• 7:31
  I don't mind giving it to you, 'cause it's part of the dive
• 7:32
  package, but what's it going to?
• 7:33
  Can you show me?" Like, Oh, you're doing coral restoration. That's kinda cool.
• 7:37
  Like, can you take me through it?" And, like, Mike will take you through it.
• 7:39
  His staff will take you through it, and they'll talk about it, and
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  they'll talk about the monitoring and everything like that.
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  That is powerful.
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  That is transparency at its core.
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  That is science.
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  That's conservation.
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  And I guess like the real test of whether the transparency was genuine
• 7:52
  came during a 2023 global bleaching event which we covered in Monday's episode.
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  ICARE kept publishing its survival numbers straight through it rather
• 7:59
  than pausing reporting or going quiet until the conditions improve.
• 8:02
  So not every outplant survives, and ICARE doesn't treat it
• 8:05
  as a failure to explain away.
• 8:08
  Coral living on a real reef faces storms, disease, and heat regardless
• 8:12
  of how carefully it was planted.
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  So some loss is simply like, to be honest, it's the honest cost of doing
• 8:18
  the work in the ocean rather than a lab.
• 8:20
  Now the more restoration that's done, the more frags are out there, probably
• 8:23
  the more survival that will happen, the more resilient it can get, the connection
• 8:26
  will be better, and that's great.
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  But the payoff in Mike's own framing, so full transparency about outcomes
• 8:31
  good and bad, is what gives the donors and dive customers a reason
• 8:36
  to trust ICARE with more support over time because they can see their
• 8:39
  specific coral's actual fate rather than just like some marketing summary.
• 8:44
  And I think again, that helps when you have a co-founder who is
• 8:47
  a scientist, a coral scientist.
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  Now this is a real world example of exactly the kind of standardized
• 8:52
  universal metric tracking.
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  That's what we need.
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  That NOAA and the Coral Restoration Consortium's own monitoring guide
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  recommends as the field standard.
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  Except ICARE was doing it way before it was even a standard.
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  Like this isn't just ICARE being unusually diligent for its own sake.
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  Independent field-wide research shows monitoring like ICARE's
• 9:10
  is the exception, not the norm.
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  So across coral restoration generally.
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  The most comprehensive look at this is a 2020 systematic review in a
• 9:19
  open source journal called PLOS ONE.
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  Which it analyzed coral restoration projects worldwide, and roughly 60% of
• 9:26
  the projects reviewed were monitored for less than 18 months total, and
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  the median monitoring period across all of them was just 12 months.
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  Like nowhere near ICARE's built-in three-year check-in that they have.
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  About 45% of the projects measured different metrics than the ecological
• 9:41
  goals that they had actually set going in, meaning like a large share of the
• 9:45
  field can't clearly show whether it achieved what it set out to do, and
• 9:49
  this could be just in project planning.
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  Not to say that the people who are in charge of this did so
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  'cause it skewed the results.
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  All I'm saying is it's good to have a plan and stick to it.
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  Like how survival itself gets measured and reported varies so much from
• 10:02
  project to project that outcomes are often not meaningfully compared across
• 10:06
  the field, and cost reporting is almost entirely absent industry-wide.
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  So funders usually have no independent way to judge value for money.
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  Now, in the review's own language, it found little to no scientific input
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  or detailed monitoring common enough across surveyed projects to describe
• 10:22
  it as a pattern and not an exception.
• 10:25
  Now, a second paper and more pointed that is worth citing in this is
• 10:28
  from in Conservation Letters in September 2025, Algier and Griffith.
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  It focuses on artificial reefs and coral restoration specifically and argues
• 10:37
  that funding for marine restoration is currently outpacing the underlying
• 10:41
  science, producing a wave of hastily planned project that risk accelerating
• 10:46
  harm to the very reefs they meant to help.
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  The paper frames this directly as greenwashing risk, meaning projects
• 10:54
  that read as conservation success stories without the monitoring
• 10:57
  behind them to support that claim.
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  And it calls for real oversight and accountability standards in the field
• 11:02
  rather than good intentions alone.
• 11:04
  It's a matter of, like, what is truthful?
• 11:07
  How can we make sure that we can compare the metrics from one coral
• 11:11
  restoration site to the next?
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  It's not a competition between the two sites.
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  It's what's working and what's not.
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  And that what do you learn from that?
• 11:18
  You learn how to do something better.
• 11:19
  You learn how every each and every site could be unique.
• 11:23
  One country site is not gonna be the same as the next country site because
• 11:27
  they have different conditions, different species, all that kind of stuff.
• 11:30
  But when you can do that worldwide and put together, oh, now you're talking.
• 11:34
  Now you're talking about a large database where you can share information.
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  I can see conferences being put in to talk about coral restoration.
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  And to increase knowledge and technology transfer and sharing of information
• 11:47
  to increase the success rate.
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  None of this is about naming or blaming any specific group.
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  It's field-wide, peer-reviewed research describing a structural problem.
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  Planting coral and photographing is easy.
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  Checking in on it years afterward and reporting the losses, honestly,
• 12:03
  like, alongside the wins is hard.
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  That's exactly the gap that ICARE chooses to close from day one, and
• 12:09
  I thought that was really cool.
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  The same gap both of these papers say most of the field hasn't done.
• 12:15
  Again, I don't want to, like, name and shame any other organization.
• 12:18
  What I want to like highlight here is that the data matters, the metrics matter, and
• 12:23
  having uniform or standardized metrics is so important to the science and to the
• 12:27
  legitimacy of the conservation success.
• 12:31
  We know it's not gonna be completely successful.
• 12:33
  Anybody in their right mind knows it's not gonna be completely successful.
• 12:37
  But what we have to do is we have to understand that we can learn from each
• 12:40
  other, and we can increase the close.
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  But if we are working separately, it's very difficult.
• 12:45
  This is like what's the beauty of science.
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  Actually, sometimes in science there's competition, there's silos.
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  But when business practitioners take it and you see one person doing one way
• 12:52
  and another person doing another way, another person-- They don't have to
• 12:54
  follow scientific standards, to be honest.
• 12:56
  They're just doing this as a way to increase their business, and they're
• 12:59
  gonna do what they need to do.
• 13:01
  And some people might take certain standardizations.
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  They might talk to one scientist who says that, or they might talk to another
• 13:06
  scientist, or may not talk to anybody and just say, "Hey, I'm just gonna
• 13:09
  look at these types of measurements."
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  I don't even know what the measurements are, to be honest, not offhand.
• 13:13
  But it would be great to have these standard metrics so that you can compare,
• 13:17
  not to say one is better than the other, but how we can help each other
• 13:20
  to ensure that these reefs are growing.
• 13:22
  It is not a competition.
• 13:24
  It is survival of coral reefs as we know it.
• 13:27
  That's what's at stake here.
• 13:30
  And, like, looking at this, it costs a lot of money to do this type of monitoring.
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  It's not easy.
• 13:34
  It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and that costs money
• 13:37
  'cause you need resources to do it.
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  And Mike describes, like, a generally uncertain funding environment at both
• 13:41
  the federal and Florida state levels.
• 13:43
  Remember, he's in Florida.
• 13:44
  Tied to an upcoming change in state administration, saying that the current
• 13:47
  administration has been incredibly supportive, but that funding has already
• 13:51
  been cut for 2028, calling the situation very uncomfortable for everyone in
• 13:55
  Florida involved in restoration work.
• 13:57
  And it tracks, 'cause with real current reporting, Florida's 2023 executive order
• 14:01
  promised to restore 25% of the state's roughly 350-mile reef track by 2050.
• 14:07
  The state allocated 28.5 million for the program's initial phase running 2023 to
• 14:13
  2026, with an original plan for roughly 25 million a year in follow-on funding.
• 14:18
  As of March 2026, neither the Florida's House nor the Senate budget proposal for
• 14:23
  the 2026 and 2027 fiscal year included continued funding for the program's
• 14:28
  second phase, leaving more than a dozen research organizations, universities,
• 14:31
  aquariums, and nonprofits needing to shuffle funding or risk losing staff.
• 14:36
  So, like, where's the funding?
• 14:38
  Where is it?
• 14:39
  Why are they not understanding that this is important to the
• 14:41
  economy of the Florida in general?
• 14:44
  This is exactly why ICARE is diversified, like mostly visitor funding model,
• 14:49
  and its radical transparency about results matter more than they would in
• 14:53
  a world of stable government funding.
• 14:55
  A funding source Mike doesn't control just got less certain.
• 14:58
  A funding source built on trust and receipts is the one he
• 15:01
  spent years building on purpose.
• 15:04
  That's where we're looking at here.
• 15:05
  We're looking at making sure funding is available.
• 15:09
  Through constant source funding where things are not going up and down.
• 15:13
  He gets constant visits from divers.
• 15:14
  They pay him on a regular basis.
• 15:16
  The Keys are one of the best places to dive in the US.
• 15:19
  And so he's gonna get that.
• 15:20
  $2 extra on a $100 dive is nothing.
• 15:23
  That is guaranteed as long as people keep coming, and if he continues to put
• 15:27
  out the monitoring, people are gonna keep coming, and that is important.
• 15:30
  That is what's needed.
• 15:31
  And I think that's like super important to how things are going.
• 15:35
  So as we look at what this framing of this is, is the fact that 100% of the animals
• 15:41
  or the outcrops that are being planted for corals are monitored, gives the donors
• 15:46
  and individual divers that pay money for these corals to be restored, gives them
• 15:50
  an idea of how successful this is done.
• 15:52
  And knowing that the industry of coral restoration is not working off the same
• 15:56
  standardized effects is troublesome.
• 15:58
  Not for the competition part, like of one area doing it better than the
• 16:01
  other, but for the advancement of restoration science for coral reefs.
• 16:05
  It is up to us to make sure that the coral reefs are restored.
• 16:08
  It's not up to anybody else.
• 16:10
  The people is where it goes.
• 16:12
  And unfortunately, the people used to have power in government, where government
• 16:16
  would fund this kind of stuff that's important to not only the economy,
• 16:19
  but also the safety of the coastline.
• 16:21
  And that seems like that, with a lot of politicians, whatever side of
• 16:24
  the aisle you're on, is just kinda goes out the window these days.
• 16:27
  Nobody's talking about climate change, or not many people, and not
• 16:30
  many people are acting fast enough to do it in terms of government.
• 16:33
  And so, we need to do it ourselves.
• 16:35
  And sometimes businesses are the best way to go forward because there's
• 16:38
  constant stream of revenue that's coming in, and that's an important aspect.
• 16:41
  That is a very important aspect.
• 16:43
  So, like, if you find a way to donate through, like, purchasing products,
• 16:47
  like if you have to spend an extra two bucks or anything, I'd love to know
• 16:49
  if you would do that kind of stuff.
• 16:51
  Let me know.
• 16:51
  Hit me up.
• 16:52
  If you're on Spotify, leave me a comment.
• 16:54
  If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast app and you
• 16:57
  wanna get in touch, you can do so by going to the show notes.
• 17:00
  You can DM me on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook.
• 17:03
  I'm on all those platforms.
• 17:04
  I'd love to hear from you.
• 17:05
  So yeah, think about that.
• 17:07
  Love to hear from you.
• 17:08
  That's the end of the episode.
• 17:09
  Thank you so much for watching this episode of the How to
• 17:11
  Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 17:12
  I am your host, Andrew Lewin.
• 17:13
  Have a great day.
• 17:13
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.