FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Dive shop owner Bill Cole leaned back in his captain’s chair, raised the volume on the Margaritaville radio station and watched six trails of bubbles trickle up through clear blue water.
Fifteen feet beneath the surface, divers drifted through one of the last thriving coral reefs in Florida, spotting juvenile parrotfish and grunts darting between branches of staghorn coral that survived the catastrophic heat waves and disease outbreaks that have rendered their species all but extinct in the continental United States.
