Ocean Science & Restoration

The Bahamas farm growing coral 50 times faster than the ocean

When Hurricane Dorian made landfall over Grand Bahama in September 2019, it carried winds of 295 kilometres per hour and a storm surge that reached 7.6 metres. For the communities of Freeport and High Rock, the damage was catastrophic. For Coral Vita, it was also specific: the storm surge destroyed the company's coral tanks, the infrastructure for what was then the world's first commercial land-based coral farm, opened just four months earlier.

Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern, who co-founded Coral Vita, spent the following months focused on humanitarian work before rebuilding the farm and reopening. The experience reinforced something that had always been central to their argument. Coral reefs don't just provide visual spectacle for tourist divers. In the Bahamas, as in every coastal nation with significant reef systems, they absorb wave energy, underpin fisheries, and generate the kind of ocean environment that tourism depends upon. When the farm went back into operation, it was doing so in a country that had watched both its reefs and its infrastructure battered in the same storm season.

Working from the Freeport facility since, the company has cultivated over 100,000 corals across 52 species, transplanted thousands of fragments back to degraded reef sites, and in June 2025 announced more than $8 million in Series A funding — the first such investment round ever completed by a coral restoration enterprise.

Months, not decades

The technique that underpins Coral Vita's operation is called microfragmentation. Developed originally by marine researcher Dr David Vaughan at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, it works by cutting coral colonies into fragments roughly one square centimetre in size. A fragment this small triggers a rapid tissue regeneration response: instead of growing slowly outwards from a single polyp, the coral focuses its energy on covering the wound surface, accelerating growth at a rate that can reach 50 times the natural pace. Species that would take decades to mature in open water can be brought to transplantable size in a matter of months.

The advantages of doing this on land, rather than in underwater nurseries, go beyond speed. Water temperature, pH, light levels, and salinity can all be controlled precisely in land-based tanks, allowing researchers to vary conditions in ways that an ocean environment never permits. It also removes the cultivated corals from the threats — bleaching events, storm damage, predation — that kill fragments in underwater nurseries before they reach maturity. The farm can also work simultaneously with a far wider range of species than is practical in the ocean, producing the genetic diversity that resilient reef systems require.

The farm currently cultivates 24 types of indigenous coral from the Bahamian reef system. Once fragments reach sufficient size, they are transplanted to degraded reef sites where they continue to grow and eventually fuse with existing substrate. On sites where Coral Vita has completed restoration work, fish populations have doubled, and transplanted corals have reached survival rates of up to 99% — a significant improvement on results from traditional ocean-based nursery methods.

The scale of what microfragmentation has to accomplish is considerable. The fourth global coral bleaching event, which ran from February 2023 through early 2025, exposed 84% of the world's reef areas to bleaching-level heat stress — the worst on record, and significant enough that NOAA's Coral Reef Watch programme introduced three new alert levels to its monitoring scale to account for mortality rates exceeding 80% in some areas. Coral reefs support roughly a quarter of all known marine species and provide an estimated $2.7 trillion annually in fisheries, coastal protection, and tourism revenues. Half of the world's reefs have already died since the 1970s; projections suggest over 90% of remaining reefs will be lost by 2050 under current emissions trajectories. Restoration alone, as Teicher and Halpern have consistently argued, cannot substitute for emissions reductions — but at current rates of decline, restoration at meaningful scale has become part of the calculus.

Training coral for a warmer ocean

The second major technique in Coral Vita's approach is assisted evolution, a method pioneered by the late Dr Ruth Gates of the University of Hawaii and Dr Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Where microfragmentation accelerates growth, assisted evolution addresses the reason so many restored corals die on the reef within years of transplanting: they are placed into ocean conditions that are already beyond the thermal tolerance of most existing species, and worsening annually.

Assisted evolution works by exposing cultivated corals to gradually elevated temperatures and increased water acidity during their time in the farm's tanks. The process does not involve genetic modification. Instead, it works with the natural physiological and symbiotic variation that exists across different coral individuals, identifying and propagating those that demonstrate stronger resilience to heat stress. The corals are not engineered; they are selected and conditioned, accelerating a process of adaptation that would otherwise take far longer than the pace of ocean warming allows.

Dr Gates, who served on Coral Vita's original advisory board before her death in 2018, was among the scientists who recognised that assisted evolution occupied a middle ground between traditional restoration and more radical genetic interventions. For commercial reef restoration, that distinction matters. The regulatory landscape for releasing selectively bred but non-modified corals into marine environments is considerably more navigable than it would be for genetically engineered organisms, particularly across the multiple national jurisdictions in which Coral Vita operates.

The bleaching data from 2023 to 2025 provides the clearest possible argument for why this conditioning matters. Corals raised to tolerate elevated temperatures do not become immune to bleaching, but they retain function at temperatures that would catastrophically damage their unadapted counterparts — a difference that, in practice, determines whether a reef recovers or does not.

"We are proving that the blue economy and ecological infrastructure is investable, profitable, and impactful," Teicher says.