Bali Aquarium Pushes Mariculture to the Next Level

20 years ago, Bali Aquarium was the first company to start commercial mariculture in Indonesia and 3 years ago, it created its own reef restoration and reef education program, called Ocean Gardener (www.oceangardener.org). Since then, they have put the tremendous knowledge they acquired, farming corals with many different locations, environment, hundreds of species towards reef restoration purposes.

Coming from a background in coral mariculture, Bali Aquarium likes to set up coral nurseries first to produce the fragments that will be later planted back on the reef. This practice eliminates the need for constant trimming of healthy corals to restore damaged reefs. This reef restoration effort has developed new planting methods that are taught to local peoples, but one new technique has become particularly promising.

Micro-fragmentation:

This piece of Dipsastraea was only 2 polyps when it was fragged and 45 days later, it already doubled that.

The concept of ‘micro-fragmentation’ is a word that’s been thrown around by very proud researchers to describe a technique that’s been used by literally millions of aquarists, over decades of reef keeping. Until now the techniques of micro fragmentation or micro propagation was only possible in inland farm, and very controlled aquarium conditions.

It was very difficult to do Micro-fragmentation in situ directly in the ocean, as too many algae, sponges, fish, parasites would overgrow, eat, kill the coral before it even recovers from the fragmentation process.

A Porites, grew to an inch long from a quarter of an inch within 3 months.

A Pavona sp grew to half an inch from a quarter of an inch within a couple months.

Micro-fragmentation is the process of fragmenting pieces of corals to the size of just a few polyps. Once the micro fragments are put back in the ocean, because they concentrate all their energy into growing, they grow much faster than mature colonies that will concentrate part of their energy into the competition, sexual reproduction… Some studies claim 25 to 50 times faster than natural corals.

A nice montipora of a month old, and at half an inch long.

Another nice Montipora grown from a quarter of an inch.

It took a bit of ‘outside the box’ thinking to come up with the right technique that would eliminate most predators but to be honest the results were beyond expectations. And within a few months, corals are healthy, even though Bali has been experiencing 30+ C seawater temperature for almost 10 months now.

A new chapter for the whole coral industry:

So far only a few genus have been tried, including some LPS such as Dipsastrea, Leptastrea, Acantastrea… and some SPS such as Porites, Montipora, Hydnophora, Cyphastrea, Pavona. But using micro-fragmentation, mariculture operation could actually grow many slower growing species much faster and in much greater quantities; It just needs to be scaled up. A long work process with the fisheries department needs to be put in place to regulate this new technique and allow the production of corals to be shipped out.

Using this technique, millions of slow growing corals could be produce for reef restoration, but also for the aquarium industry. This with very limited energy.

This is more evidence that we have only scratched the surface of what is possible through intensive mariculture of corals. This restoration potential has been explored, and there are still a lot to work to do, so that fewer corals are extracted from the ocean for our hobby. This is also a great example, that our hobby has an important role to play in actually helping to restore reefs.

A freshly cut and recovered piece of Leptastrea sp.

Bali Aquarium, is a member of KPKHN, the Indonesian Coral Mariculture Association.If you want to help with their restoration efforts, please go to the official Ocean Gardener website.

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Vincent Chalias

Vincent is a coral passionate aquarist with extensive experience in the industry, travelling the world to learn about corals. His background is a master degree in Marine Aquaculture. He set up the first Indonesian Coral mariculture farms at the beginning of the century and spent over 20 years in Indonesia running them. He's been extensively diving and documenting corals all over the Indo-Pacific.