The Batavia Coral Farm is a new operation in Western Australia which is the only coral farm offering corals from the Indian Ocean. This week Batavia Coral Farm officially opened for business, serving up a wide variety of farmed stony corals for the Australian marine aquarium market.
Batavia Coral farm is located in the Abrohlos Islands, Australia’s “Coral Coast”, four and a half hours North of Perth and 60 km west of Geraldton. The Abrohlos chain consists of 122 islands clustered into three main groups: the Wallabi Group, Easter Group and Palsaert Group, which extend from north to south across 100 kilometers of ocean.
The Abrohlos islands are situated in Western Australia’s warm, southward-flowing Leeuwin Current attracting a unique mix of tropical and temperate sea life. The beautiful but treacherous reef-surrounded atolls have claimed many shipwrecks over the centuries, the most notable wreck in 1692, the Dutch East India Company ship called the Batavia.
What really caught our eye about Batavia was the hand crafted growing platforms which appear to be tethered to the reef while also being lifted by buoys, suspended just below the waters surface.
Today the Batavia coral farm is licensed to collect up to 80 species of corals and is the first coral farm we know of in Western Australia to begin distribution of aquacultured corals. Batavia is now open for wholesale distribution within the Australian market, and are waiting for international export permits, which could be in place as early as Spring 2016.
Get ready! We recently wrote about Aquacultured acropora and stony corals coming from Australia and we can’t wait to see some of the Indian Ocean species coming exclusively from Batavia.
