The Coral Maker: deploying corals at scale to help save the Great Barrier Reef and save the seafloors of marine mammals, marine mammals and marine mammals

Growing replacement corals in a nursery and manually grafting them onto existing reefs is labor intensive, expensive, and slow. The process of building an adult-sized skeleton of a coral takes 3-6 years for different species. Foster’s company, Coral Maker, is trying to speed up this process. Foster worked in her family’s masonry business before researching coral reefs and climate change. Now she is using the family’s dry-casting machines to produce limestone shapes that resemble the natural skeletons of corals—the plan is to provide young corals with a suitable foundation from which they can grow faster.

Foster says even a small number of healthy and upgraded corals should not be enough to save the entire ecosystems. “We need some way of deploying corals at scale.” It sounds like a job to some of the machines.

In the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, coral growth has slowed in recent decades, partly because during heat waves the corals expel the tiny algae that live inside their tissues and provide them with nutrients, causing 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.

How to Make Coral Makers? A Journey through the Caribbean Sea with Artificial Coral Reefs and the Global Coral Conservancy in the Nearby Sea

The first prototype of the Coral Maker skeleton is dome-shaped and has six plugs where live coral fragments can be placed. There are many species of corals that grow in dome forms and branching from a solid base, so the skeleton design takes inspiration from nature. Foster says that there are challenges with dome-shaped skeletons. “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.” That’s why Foster continues to tinker with the design so that the masonry machinery can soon produce up to 10,000 pieces a day for just a few dollars. The process could then be replicated in other factories.

In the Caribbean Sea it started. Jaime Ascencio, then a business development engineer working across Latin America, was eager to find sustainable ways to combat the coastal erosion that was eating away at the region’s treasured beaches—and threatening the tourism dollars brought in by its seaside resorts. “If there is no sand, there are no guests,” he says. Ascensio knew that artificial reefs would be good for natural breakwaters, but he couldn’t find solutions that were sustainable or stable enough to resist the waves. 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.

It’s not unusual for the principle behind the startup to exist in nature. All over the world, coral reefs act as a natural buffer, protecting coastal regions from waves, storms, and tsunamis. According to a group of researchers who analyzed corals in all corners of the world, coral reefs can dissipate a staggering 97 percent of wave energy before it reaches the shoreline. Corals support more species per unit area than any other marine environment, and only a small portion of the ocean floor.