President of the UN Geneva General Assembly, Abdulla Shahid and Colin touring the Center for Marine Innovation upon its completion.

Coral Morphologic was recently commissioned by Fundación Grupo Puntacana (FGPC) at the Punta Cana Resort & Club to overhaul and upgrade their coral restoration lab infrastructure at their Center for Marine Innovation with funding support from the German GIZ. This project entailed re-plumbing an outdoor greenhouse that is capable of running either closed-loop, or pulling water directly from the ocean for easy flushing and water changes. Additionally, a climate-controlled indoor lab was also constructed utilizing the latest technology for coral aquaculture, including Ecotech G5 XR30 LED lights, Apex Neptune aquarium computers, Reef Octopus protein skimmers, and calcium reactors. This improved lab infrastructure is enabling marine scientists at FGPC to generate thousands of microfrags of massive reef-building species such as brain and star corals. These important corals will add needed biodiversity to their long-running reef restoration program that has successfully out-planted thousands of staghorn corals grown on their underwater nursery tables offshore.

The climate-controlled indoor coral microfragmentation systems and wet lab feature state-of-the-art LED and aquarium technology to keep freshly fragmented corals healthy.

Coral microfragmentation: growing corals smarter and faster.

Outdoor microfragmentation systems are utilized for long-term grow-out before the corals are transplanted back onto Puntacana’s reefs.

The indoor coral microfragmentation systems and wet lab were designed with a viewing window that enables tourists to observe marine scientists microfragging and growing corals, without interrupting their work.