The race is on to save the coral reefs

Coral Maker: A Robotic Project to Grow Replacement Corals on Damaged Reelps and Coral Skeletons in the Great Barrier Reef

Growing replacement corals in a nursery and manually grafting them onto existing reefs is labor intensive, expensive, and slow. Corals are slow growers, taking three to 10 years for their skeletons to be adult-sized. With her company, Coral Maker, Foster is trying to accelerate this process. Foster used to be in her family’s masonry business. She is using the family’s dry-casting machines to make limestone shapes that look like coral skeletons, and the plan is to provide young corals with a suitable foundation to grow faster.

Foster says that even if thousands of healthy corals were put on damaged reefs, they wouldn’t be enough to save the entire system. “We need some way of deploying corals at scale.” It seems like a job for some robots.

Coral growth has slowed in the Great Barrier Reef because of heat waves and the smallalgae that live inside their tissues which cause them to bleach. Bleached corals are not dead but are more at risk of starvation and disease, and the loss of coral reefs has a devastating impact on the thousands of fish, crabsc and other marine animals that rely on them for shelter and food.

The Coral Maker: Rewilding the Ocean to Protect the Coastline Using Artificial Coral Reservoirs in the Caribbean Sea, as seen by Michael Foster

The first prototype of the Coral Maker skeleton is dome-shaped and has six plugs where live coral fragments can be placed. The skeleton design takes inspiration from nature: Many species such as brain corals grow in a dome shape, while branching or plate corals grow upward from a solid base. But there are also challenges with dome-shaped skeletons, says Foster. “They’re not as easy to manufacture as something with a flat surface, they’re not as easy to pack on a pallet, they’re not as easy to glue stuff on.” Foster continues to make improvements to the design so that the masonry machinery can eventually produce 10,000 pieces a day for just a few dollars. The process could be replicated in other factories.

It started in the Caribbean Sea. The erosion of the coastline was taking away from the region’s cherished beaches, threatening the tourism dollars brought in by its seaside resorts. He says that there are no guests if there is no sand. Ascensio knew that artificial reefs could make for natural breakwaters, but he couldn’t find a solution that was stable and sustainable. So he went on to get a master’s in coastal engineering at the celebrated Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands—and developed one himself.

In many ways, the underlying principle behind the startup—that rewilding the ocean can protect the coastline—already exists in nature. Coral reefs are a natural buffer between waves, storms, and earthquakes in the world. A group of researchers, who analyzed corals in all corners of the globe, said that coral reefs can counteract 97 percent of wave energy before it reaches the shoreline. Corals also support more species per unit area than any other marine environment while covering only 0.01 percent of the ocean floor.