How to train your coral: lessons from an AI-driven aquaculture farm | Gator Halpern | TEDxBoston

Can we imagine a world without coral reefs? The projections are grim. At current warming trajectories, over 90% will be dead by 2050. The good news is that restoration works. The challenge is whether we can make it work fast enough. A new generation of technology is making it possible to grow coral colonies in months rather than decades, breed for heat resistance, and deploy AI to monitor reef health at a global scale. The reefs our children inherit will depend on the work we do right now, while there is still magic left to save. Gator Halpern is the co-founder and President of Coral Vita, a land-based coral farm that grows reef-building corals up to 50 times faster than conventional methods using micro-fragmentation and assisted evolution techniques. Coral Vita operates farms in the Bahamas and is scaling production with KAUST University in Saudi Arabia toward 400,000 coral colonies per year. He holds a degree from Yale University and has worked with reef restoration programs across the Caribbean and the Red Sea. Coral Vita's work has been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Fast Company, and the United Nations, and his team is developing AI-powered monitoring tools that allow practitioners to track coral health and survivorship at scale. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx