Coral Vita

Coral Vita is a Bahamian for-profit enterprise that cultivates coral fragments for transplant into degraded reefs.^[1] The company was founded in 2017 by Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern after graduate research at the Yale School of the Environment.^[2]

In May 2019, Coral Vita opened its Freeport, Grand Bahama site,^[3] which was destroyed months later by Hurricane Dorian.^[4] In January 2021, Coral Vita secured a US $2 million seed round to expand tank volume and automation and move its operations to land-based farms.^[5]

The company won the inaugural Earthshot Prize in October 2021, receiving a £1 million award in the “Revive Our Oceans” category.^[6]

Coral Vita employs microfragmentation, an established coral cultivation technique in which corals are cut into small pieces to stimulate tissue regrowth, reducing grow-out times.^[7][8][9] The method was discovered in 2003 by marine researcher Dr. David Vaughan and restoration ecologist Christopher Page.^[10]

The company has also begun using assisted-evolution techniques that employ artificial-intelligence tools to screen coral genomes for vulnerability to predators, disease, and tank-condition changes.^[11] Following identification through AI screening, genotypes with greater resistance are subjected to heat-stress and salinity trials and, if successful, bred sexually, rather than by clonal fragmentation, to produce stock for future out-planting.^[12][13]

Additionally, the company practices indoor spawning with controlled lighting schedules, which allows for up to four reproductive cycles annually instead of one.^[14]

Coral Vita sells restoration services to coastal hotels, insurers, governments, and cruise-port developers that rely on healthy reefs for shoreline protection, fisheries, and tourism.^[15] The company also runs school programs and ships small-scale demonstration tanks to science centers.^[16]

Slate observed that a predictable client base exists because builders and shipping firms often sign legal agreements to repair reef damage they cause, creating a steady flow of paid restoration work. The same article cautioned that the availability of commercial fixes could tempt some operators to treat reef loss as an acceptable cost of doing business, and marine biologist Judy Lang told Slate that transplanting corals is ineffective if local water quality and heat stress remain unresolved.^[17] Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten cited Coral Vita while warning that reefs could vanish by 2050 without emissions cuts.^[18]