Founders Highlight Series: Coral Maker
We had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Taryn Foster, Coral Maker’s Founder. Coral Maker incorporates tech with science to scale up the restoration rate and success of coral reefs.
Historically, coral reef restoration projects have been conducted on a small scale and are generally quite labor-intensive. Coral Maker technology aims to mitigate these operational limitations by using mass production techniques to automate coral propagation.
This revolutionary technology is particularly important due to coral reefs’ vulnerability to climate change and the demand to restore reefs at a large scale from increasingly extreme events such as bleaching, acidification, agricultural run-off, cyclone damage, etc.
In this article, we talk through what inspired the idea behind Coral Maker and learn more about why we desperately need coral restoration at a larger scale.
1.Tell us a bit about your background as a coral biologist and what sparked the idea for Coral Maker.
I was researching the impacts of climate change on coral reefs and saw two bleaching events in the space of 6 years unfold on the reefs I was studying. It was devastating to see the impact of these events on the ecosystem and how long it takes the system to recover.
I started to think that in the context of rapid climate change, more needed to be done to save coral reefs (in addition to emissions reductions). Coral restoration has been put forward as a solution, but currently isn’t possible at the reef scale. Coral Maker is tackling this scale issue using technology (robotics, mass production techniques) to upscale the production and deployment of corals to the reef.
2.How have you found incorporating the manufacturing industry with science?
My academic background is in science, but my family’s business is in the manufacturing industry, so a lot of the concepts around supply chain, logistics, automation, and mass production are things I’ve grown up with. What I’ve found fascinating is imagining the supply chain from the ground up.
Since there is currently very little to work with in this space, we have this extraordinary opportunity to build a sustainable, efficient supply chain and plan it holistically right from the start. This includes things like the materials we use, the manufacturing processes, efficient logistics, and localised production, carbon neutral and carbon negative techniques.
3.What has been the greatest challenge of founding a new organisation?
One of the things I have found challenging at times, but also really interesting and rewarding, is how to take an idea or a solution and actually apply it in the real world. As researchers, we are taught how to ask good questions, then generate and analyse data to investigate possible answers to those questions. But that’s usually where the process stops in research.
There is a disconnect that you see in many industries, between research and practical application, which is where the real impact is. I think entrepreneurs with technical backgrounds in these industries can provide a critical link there, but the pathway is still an unclear and bumpy one!
4.What is your biggest accomplishment to date?
In my experience, there is rarely a major ‘aha’ moment in research and invention, it has more been a series of smaller accomplishments that reflect the incremental design-prototype-test-iterate process. But we are excited about the progress we have made using robotics to automate parts of coral propagation and we also have corals growing away on our manufactured coral skeletons out at the Abrolhos Islands.
5.How has the uptake of your initiative been and what do you hope to achieve over the next few years?
We are in the second round of R&D at the moment, with three lines of research underway; ocean-based coral trials, manufacturing, and robotics. We are working towards a large-scale pilot study. We want to show what is possible with using this technology, in terms of large-scale deployment of corals in a fraction of the time.
Find out more about Coral Maker here: https://www.coralmaker.org/