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He Almost Quit the Dive Business. Then a Coral Reef PhD Student Walked In. · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  I wanna tell you a story of a dive shop owner's wife who told him that
• 0:04
  it's time to get out of the business.
• 0:05
  We're in the Keys.
• 0:07
  The environment's not looking that great.
• 0:08
  We don't know how long we're gonna be in business, if people are gonna come
• 0:11
  out anymore if the reefs are gone.
• 0:13
  So she tells him, "We gotta get out now. We gotta sell before it's too late."
• 0:17
  He doesn't know what to do about it.
• 0:19
  It's a very difficult decision when you've spent decades trying to have a dive shop,
• 0:24
  get it off the ground, you know, get good clientele coming back and forth.
• 0:27
  You're in the Keys, you're in one of the best places in the US to dive.
• 0:31
  And then so he's thinking about this.
• 0:32
  He's like, "This is a major life decision." He's approaching sort of
• 0:35
  the, you know, closer to his retirement.
• 0:37
  He's like, "Wait a minute, I'm not sure if I can do this." Then a grad student
• 0:40
  walks into his shop, a marine biology grad student, and just to fill a couple scuba
• 0:44
  tanks 'cause she's got to do some work.
• 0:46
  And by the time she leaves, he asked her, like, a dozen questions about
• 0:49
  the reef and what's been going on.
• 0:52
  And that's the entire origin of the story of a nonprofit that's
• 0:56
  since planted its first coral it started as small as a tank fill.
• 1:00
  We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How
• 1:02
  to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 1:03
  It's a great story about, you know, a guy who doesn't know much about…
• 1:07
  Like, he's not a marine biologist.
• 1:09
  He doesn't know much about the science of reefs or things like
• 1:11
  that, but he's gone diving a lot.
• 1:13
  And that's what we're gonna talk about today.
• 1:14
  And so if you wanted to learn more about this, and this is the type of information
• 1:17
  you like to learn, don't forget to follow on your favorite podcast app so that you
• 1:20
  get more stories of this Monday to Friday.
• 1:22
  Every week we kinda pick a theme, and this week's theme is coral
• 1:25
  reefs and coral restoration.
• 1:26
  And we're gonna talk about this story of how this dive owner became the president
• 1:31
  of an organization that plants corals, and so that the other dive businesses
• 1:36
  can do really well and his as well.
• 1:37
  So we're gonna find out how he does that, all that kinda stuff
• 1:39
  and the origin story of that.
• 1:41
  It's kinda like a Marvel movie, I guess.
• 1:43
  No, no, it's not.
• 1:44
  Uh, but it's a great story anyway, so let's look at it.
• 1:47
  Now, Mike Goldberg had over 10,000 dives and decades in the dive business.
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  Enough to have seen that, like, Florida coral reefs at their pristine,
• 1:56
  almost the impeccable finest.
• 1:59
  Some of the dives that he's done like, decades ago, wall-to-wall coral.
• 2:03
  Imagine just diving, and you're just going through, and you're
• 2:06
  probably maybe, like, 10 feet, 20 feet deep, maybe a little bit more.
• 2:09
  You're in the Keys, beautiful weather, nice calm day on the boat.
• 2:13
  You dive down, and you see wall-to-wall corals.
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  Like, just, sea fans going back and forth.
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  You see these hard corals that are causing, like, the complex, like,
• 2:22
  the branching corals and the plate corals, and they're causing this, like,
• 2:25
  complexity in the system where you're seeing all these little critters hide.
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  Fish, like, schools of fish by the hundreds and thousands of them.
• 2:32
  And you see all these little critters that come out, these invertebrates,
• 2:35
  shrimp and crabs, and all the nematodes and worms, and all these wonderful things
• 2:39
  that you get to see when you go to a reef.
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  It is why people travel to the Keys all of the time.
• 2:45
  But then he had his first widespread coral bleach event around 2008.
• 2:49
  It was like a huge event across the eastern Caribbean.
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  And it was a shock.
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  He even says like, "We didn't even know coral bleaching was.
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  Now, about 10 years before that, there was a thing called stony coral
• 3:02
  loss disease, SCTDL, and it hit.
• 3:05
  And Mike, as a non-scientist, he was like, almost threw up my hands and, like,
• 3:09
  describing it as genuinely depressing.
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  He's just like, "I'm done.
• 3:13
  I can't do it." "The corals are all dying." It hit, like,
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  crazy amounts of corals.
• 3:19
  Just to explain what it is, cause it's a specific crisis
• 3:22
  here that we're talking about.
• 3:24
  It was first identified off Virginia Key near Miami in the fall of 2014.
• 3:29
  So almost exactly about 10 years ago, of that window that
• 3:32
  Mike was describing to me.
• 3:34
  The cause is still not fully identified, but it's a bacteria that appear to be
• 3:37
  involved since like, the antibiotic treatment slows its progression,
• 3:41
  so it must be, like, a bacteria.
• 3:42
  But no single confirmed pathogen has been pinned down to this disease.
• 3:46
  But what makes it different from bleaching is bleaching is a stress
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  response a coral can sometimes recover from once the water temperature drops.
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  But with stony coral tissue disease, it kills living coral tissue outright.
• 3:59
  So in lesions that can spread, like, five to 40 square centimeters a day.
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  So it's rapidly spreading, and often kills the entire colony within weeks to months.
• 4:07
  It affects more than 20 of Florida's roughly 45 stony, coral species.
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  So there are difference in corals.
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  There are stony and soft corals.
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  So the stony corals are, like, the hard corals, the stuff you scratch
• 4:17
  yourself on if you're a diver or a snorkeler or a free diver.
• 4:20
  The soft corals are kinda like they're more tissue than skeleton and they,
• 4:25
  you know, mushroom corals, Xenia, like, all these different… They're
• 4:28
  very, like, wavy, very flowery.
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  Some are thick, like the mushroom corals can be thick at times.
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  But the stony corals are, like, the branching corals, the
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  flat corals, the brain corals.
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  Those are the stony corals, the hard corals, right?
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  They have that hard limestone skeleton where the soft ones don't.
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  But this is like, 20 out of 45 stony coral species are affected, including
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  the major reef-building species like the brain and pillar corals.
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  With mortality, almost the most vulnerable species running as high
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  as 66 to 100% through virtually the entire Florida Reef Tract.
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  An estimated 90% of it, more than 109,000 acres, and onto reefs in at
• 5:03
  least 18 countries and territories across the wider Caribbean.
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  So this has hit everybody.
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  This has hit a lot of people.
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  Now at that time, his wife told him directly, it's like, "What are you
• 5:12
  gonna do? You know, like the product that you sell, the reef, it's not what
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  it used to be, and it's not getting better." So she suggested he get out
• 5:20
  of the business before it's too late.
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  You know?
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  Or you're not gonna have anything to sell.
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  You're not gonna have anything to offer on these dives.
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  And that's just like, this is a wife, not, again, not a scientist.
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  Maybe not in the know of what's happening, not following the
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  science, and that's fine.
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  That's normal.
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  This is a business person.
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  This person is trying to show people a good time.
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  Her and her husband are trying to show people a good time at the
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  dive sites, and it's beautiful.
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  Like, when you go to a lot of dive sites, like they care about the ocean so much.
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  It's not just their business, but it's what they do.
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  And Mike was the same thing.
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  Mike and his wife, like, they care about it.
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  But at some point you have to ask yourself, "Is this, like,
• 5:54
  a thing that we're gonna do?" He's like, "What am I gonna do?
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  I have no idea." But he's not a person that he describes.
• 6:00
  So I interview him on Friday and he says, "I'm not a person that,
• 6:04
  like, I'm gonna just give up."
• 6:05
  So around 2017 into 2018, a young woman walked into Mike's
• 6:10
  shop just to fill up some tanks.
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  She turned out to be Dr. Kylie Smith, who ended up being a
• 6:15
  co-founder of ICARE For with him.
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  She was working on her PhD, studying the relationship between parrotfish
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  populations and coral outplants nearby.
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  Now he's like, "All right, Kylie.
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  Like, I don't know you too well, but I need you to sit down.
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  You're a scientist, you know, you're a PhD student." So, like, just to let people
• 6:30
  know, like, although graduate students, master's and PhD students are technically
• 6:34
  students, they know a hell of a lot.
• 6:36
  Like, they have been doing review after review and been pounded with
• 6:39
  information throughout their undergrad and graduate studies where they know
• 6:42
  a lot, especially about the particular subject that they're studying.
• 6:45
  Here is Kylie, a PhD student, who's studying the, uh, relationship
• 6:48
  between parrotfish populations and coral plants in the Keys.
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  So she knows a lot about the environment.
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  She probably knows a lot about what's happening.
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  So he sits down and he's like, "I don't know you too well, but I need
• 6:57
  to ask you a bunch of questions."
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  He's like, that's exactly how their relationship, like business
• 7:01
  relationship started, is just him just sitting there and being
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  like, " You know, I'm not a scientist.
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  I need to know, like, what is happening.
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  I need to know whether I need to close my business down." She came
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  back two to three weeks later, and he then he says, "She couldn't get out
• 7:12
  without me asking a dozen questions."
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  He calls it his period of discovery.
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  This is a period where he was able to find out from a scientist, from an expert,
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  about what's happening with the reef.
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  That's a huge, huge thing.
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  A lot of business owners are just gonna be like, "How can I make money?
• 7:29
  How can I make more money?
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  How can I stay with making the money that I am?
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  What if people don't come anymore?" So he needs to ask questions about
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  what's happening to the reef, and are there ways to make it better.
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  And it took a roughly a year to figure out, like, the
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  direction he wanted to take.
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  And part of that year was Mike convincing Kylie not to take a
• 7:45
  government job and instead running her own nonprofit, something her
• 7:49
  own family said was a little risky.
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  'Cause like, look, you're a PhD student, you graduate with your PhD. And then you
• 7:55
  gotta figure out what you're gonna do.
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  And even before you graduate and before your defense,
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  you're looking for post-docs.
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  You're looking at which you can get at government or you can get at institutions,
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  like in academic institutions.
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  You might go to a nonprofit.
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  You might go to, like, a coral restoration foundation that's already established.
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  The options are there, but it's just a matter of, like, what she wants to do, but
• 8:14
  it's not always easy to get a government job or to get anything like this.
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  This is in 2018.
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  Trump administration, the first time, was in power.
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  Environmental jobs weren't coming by the wayside, especially for government, so
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  there's not a lot available at that time.
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  And of course, it's before COVID, so God knows what would've happened if
• 8:30
  she had taken a job somewhere else.
• 8:32
  You know, he's convincing her.
• 8:34
  He's like, "Hey, you need to start something with me. We need to do
• 8:36
  something together. We need to start a nonprofit." And he convinced her.
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  He's like, "I need to do it." And he's like, "It's gonna be great.
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  Trust me," like, " We're gonna make this work." And look, he's had this experience
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  of running a business for, like, 30 years.
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  A dive business.
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  He knows the reef, and local information is always better
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  when you couple it with science.
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  Or science is always better when you couple it with local knowledge.
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  And so I think it worked.
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  And it did.
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  It worked.
• 9:00
  Her connections in the scientific community, his connections in the
• 9:03
  dive industry, it was perfect.
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  And in comes ICARE, which is a nonprofit, and the partnership started with Mote
• 9:10
  Marine Laboratories, and the first coral went into the water in January 2021.
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  Now, I think you have to realize the way all of this works is you
• 9:19
  have to establish, you know… Like, there's a lot to go into it.
• 9:22
  There's the infrastructure of actually putting up a nonprofit organization,
• 9:25
  like starting a nonprofit, building the team, finding partners.
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  Like Mote Marine Laboratories is not just your regular partner.
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  It is Mote Marine Laboratories.
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  It is internationally known.
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  They have a great coral program.
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  They know Florida very well.
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  Some of the best researchers have come and gone through that and continue
• 9:42
  to be there in the laboratories.
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  And so having the knowledge and the backing of them, plus a bunch of other
• 9:48
  partners now, you start to realize, like, you can do a lot of things here.
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  Now it's just a matter of actually implementing, 'cause
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  they knew the science was there.
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  They knew the science said, "Hey, locally, we can actually restore
• 9:59
  this area, this reef on Islamorada." The keys that they were on.
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  Now, since the start, since that first frag went in, that first coral went in
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  in January 2021, it's grown into, like, Eye Care propagating all its own coral,
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  running its own onshore nursery with nine offshore coral and sponge nurseries
• 10:15
  installing this October coming up.
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  Plus partnerships with Reef Renewal USA, Mote Marine Lab, the Florida
• 10:22
  Aquarium, and the Reef Institute.
• 10:24
  So there's a lot of places where this is growing out.
• 10:27
  And it's like, for the last five and a half years through COVID, like, they
• 10:30
  started at the beginning of COVID.
• 10:32
  If you know business owners, whether it's nonprofits or for-profits, and
• 10:35
  if you ever watched them or asked them questions during COVID how to manage
• 10:39
  their business, that's a tough thing.
• 10:41
  That's a tough thing.
• 10:42
  Like dive shops, I don't even know how Mike kept his dive shop open during COVID.
• 10:46
  Like, I know Florida was different, I know the US was different in the way
• 10:48
  they managed it, but not a lot of people were traveling for a good amount of
• 10:51
  time before it started to open up again.
• 10:53
  And a lot of businesses, like especially tourist business, lost money 'cause people
• 10:56
  weren't going on planes because that's where you caught a lot of COVID, right?
• 11:00
  'Cause we know planes are bad for that kind of stuff to pass
• 11:02
  around just the common cold, let alone a global pandemic disease.
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  And whatever you think about the pandemic or not, it doesn't matter.
• 11:08
  People just weren't moving around that much.
• 11:10
  And to be able to not only continue his business, like his dive business
• 11:14
  for Mike through that, but also start and grow ICARE, a nonprofit
• 11:18
  organization that looks for funding all the time, that's a very difficult
• 11:21
  thing to do, and he's able to grow it.
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  And in the interview on Friday, you'll see how much he's gonna
• 11:25
  be growing it and going into the details of those pop-up installations
• 11:28
  of these reef, sort of nurseries.
• 11:31
  And it's amazing.
• 11:32
  Absolutely amazing.
• 11:33
  And ICARE, like, didn't start with, like, a grant or a strategic plan.
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  It started with people having conversations at a dive shop.
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  And the dive shop's owner's, like, frustration, and his one chance to
• 11:43
  have a conversation by a grad student who just happened to walk in, who was
• 11:47
  a coral reef researcher, and then this partnership bloomed into something
• 11:51
  like ICARE, which is phenomenal.
• 11:53
  Not something like ICARE, ICARE.
• 11:55
  And if you wanna go to the website, let me just pull it up here.
• 11:58
  It's icareaboutcoral.org.
• 12:01
  It's that simple.
• 12:02
  I'll put the links in the show notes.
• 12:03
  But the disease that pushed Mike to act, that stony coral tissue
• 12:07
  disease, it's not like bleaching.
• 12:09
  It's unresolved, it's contagious, tissue-killing outbreak that's been
• 12:12
  actively spreading through Florida and the wider Caribbean for over
• 12:15
  a decade with no confirmed cause.
• 12:18
  But this partnership worked because it paired the two different expertise that
• 12:22
  don't usually sit in the same room, right?
• 12:24
  A scientist's research, a small business owner's community
• 12:26
  connections, and the, his hustle.
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  And I think when you start to watch your own livelihood, you know, and you see it
• 12:32
  decline, and you choose to act instead of just walk away, that's admirable.
• 12:36
  That's its own kind of origin story, separate from the science.
• 12:40
  It's people who need to survive.
• 12:42
  It's this resilience that people have and communities have.
• 12:46
  And like there are big things coming with ICARE About Coral.
• 12:49
  There really is, and you're gonna see that over the years.
• 12:51
  We're gonna cover that.
• 12:52
  We're gonna have Mike back on, probably have Kylie on as well, and it's just
• 12:56
  phenomenal, and I think you're gonna be very proud to see that people
• 12:58
  are actually fighting out there.
• 12:59
  It builds my optimism, it builds my enthusiasm to get more of
• 13:03
  these stories out there to you because we need these stories.
• 13:06
  We need the people to fight.
• 13:07
  Whether it's local, whether it's just, like, to build a little bit of resiliency
• 13:11
  until we figure out this climate change thing or act on this climate change thing,
• 13:14
  that's something that's tangible that we can bring home and just be like, "Yes,
• 13:18
  somebody out there is doing something."
• 13:19
  And he's not the only one.
• 13:20
  And Kylie's not the only one.
• 13:21
  But they are doing a great job, and we're gonna hear more about that this week.
• 13:25
  We're gonna talk about, the monitoring that they're doing, the
• 13:27
  transparency that they're gonna have.
• 13:29
  You're gonna hear all about it.
• 13:30
  And it's gonna be pretty big, so I'm looking forward to seeing
• 13:32
  that turn into something huge.
• 13:34
  But that's it for today's episode.
• 13:35
  I really appreciate you listening in.
• 13:37
  If you have any questions or comments, you know, please feel
• 13:40
  free to hit me up on my socials.
• 13:42
  If you're on Spotify, just put a comment.
• 13:44
  I usually get pinged when a comment is up, and I'll r-reply
• 13:47
  usually within the next 24 hours.
• 13:49
  So hit me up on Spotify in a comment if you have a question, comment,
• 13:52
  anything like that on the podcast.
• 13:54
  And if not, just go to the show notes.
• 13:56
  Not only will you get the website for ICARE About Coral, but you'll also get,
• 14:00
  the links to my social so you can DM me on either Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
• 14:04
  But I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the
• 14:07
  How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 14:08
  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
• 14:09
  Have a great day.
• 14:10
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.