Dr. Rhyne and his colleagues describe coral farming in small island communities as a potential tool for conservation at the local level.
Can It Be Reborn?" (May 1): The coral farming and transplantation efforts described in Cornelia Dean's article may prove useful in restoring individual patches of reef in popular tourist sites.
Also, supporting the work of scientists and entrepreneurs doing cutting-edge research to innovate coral farming and create temperature resistant corals that can be planted to restore coral reefs, like Coral Vita.
Coral aquaculture, also known as coral farming or coral gardening, is the cultivation of corals for commercial purposes or coral reef restoration.
We could tell you about how the duo own and operate Miami's premiere multimedia lab for coral farming, home to hundreds of rare, fluorescent, and color-changing corals and creepy-crawlers from the coastline, or about how Foord and McKay are in the throes of an emergency search-and-rescue mission to save hundreds of coral colonies from FL governor Rick Scott's disastrous dredging plan.
From a conservation standpoint, these simple transmission assays provide a means for identifying disease resistant coral strains, which in combination with coral farming and local replanting of diverse sets of disease resistant coral genotypes, would provide an effective means to restore threatened Acropora populations throughout the Caribbean.
The tourism industry also responds by increasing effort, for instance, by fish-feeding and coral farming, concentrating effort on remaining coral refuges, travelling further south and offshore, and diversifying into other water-based activities.
Corals farmed in a vertical orientation had the lowest survival rate of the caged experiments (36.7%) but showed that chimeric/aggregated entities performed significantly better than the single colonies.
Coral Vita farms corals to rebuild reefs that are resilient and hearty for both ecotourism and habitat restoration.
Coral is farmed by coral farmers who live locally to the reefs and farm for reef conservation or for income.
