Can coral farms save our reefs? Growing coral on land to save our reefs

Underwater desert

In an effort to prevent this alarming prospect, two US environmental entrepreneurs have taken a stand, opening the world’s first commercial land-based coral farm in the Caribbean.

fSam Teicher and Gator Halpern, both 29, grew up near the ocean in the United States and connected over their shared passion for coral reefs at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

“[Global reef loss] is an ecological and socio-economic tragedy. A quarter of marine life depends on coral reefs and a billion people around the world depend on them for their livelihoods,” Teicher told CNN.

After securing $2 million in investment, they opened the first farm last month, on Grand Bahama, The Bahamas’ most northern island, where fishermen told them local reefs look like “rubble fields compared to the underwater forests they [once were].”

“They describe it like going out to fish in an underwater desert,” Teicher said.

Global reef restoration

According to Teicher and Halpern, this new method enables them to scale up previous restoration efforts, which have so far focused on reviving coral colonies underwater.

Teicher said traditional coral farming was too slow and restrictive as it only allowed for the restoration of fast-growing reefs.

“Underwater coral nurseries struggle to scale to counter global degradation and are jeopardized by events like storms, fishing accidents, and bleaching events,” he added.

Coral Vita is a commercial business, which sells “restoration services to customers who depend on reefs’ tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection benefits”, including governments, conservation groups and insurance companies, Teicher explained.

With their pilot project in The Bahamas, Teicher and Halpern aim to grow 10,000 coral fragments from 10 local species, but in the future they hope to open restoration farms growing millions of different corals in all countries with reefs and revive all dying species.

“The reefs and people who depend on them need help everywhere,” Teicher said, adding that besides offering food security, reefs also provide coastal residents with flood protection by acting as a natural barrier against storm surges.

Climate resilience

The biggest threat to reefs is climate change, according to Teicher.

Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have also made oceans more acidic, creating “conditions that don’t allow most corals to thrive,” according to Teicher.

By creating warmer and more acidic growing conditions at its farms, Coral Vita aims to “strengthen coral resilience” and train the reefs to adapt to global warming impacts, he explained.

According to Guilhem Banc-Prandi, a marine biologist at the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat in Israel, there is evidence that coral that has undergone microfragmentation performs better in warmer temperatures.

“When we expose those corals to really warm temperatures, they are even performing better [than before],” he said.

But Banc-Prandi said there are also limitations to coral farming on land. It is very expensive and great care must be taken to prevent transplanted corals from being destroyed by natural hazards, he said.

“Restoration must go in parallel with conservation. Not only do we need to bring corals back into the sea, but we also need to rebuild the whole reef ecosystem,” he added.

Although restoration offers hope for the future of our reefs, “it is not a silver bullet,” Teicher warned, stressing that the most important aim should be eliminating pollution and overfishing, and reducing emissions — three global drivers of coral degradation.

“We can replant the forest, but the best thing to do is not cut it down in the first place,” he said.