Ocean Habitats founder David Wolff worked on the Mini Reef as an aquaculture experiment with others at the Marine Habitat Foundation during the mid 1990's.  The device's original purpose was a to grow thousands of fish or crabs every year.  After $500,000 of grant funded research and over 65,000 hours of staff and volunteer work the initial prototype had been developed.   Well over 300 failed designs had produced more than 34 systems that had residential or commercial applications.

Around this time the funding for this work dried up in the late 1990's and the work ended.  The research was abandoned and sat idle for years.  After 17 years of units sitting in the water on Sanibel Island, FL weathering hurricanes Katrina, Wilma, Charlie and more plus numerous tropical storms David Wolff returned from a high level business career.  His intent was to bring this work full circle to produce a final working model residents of coastal communities  could use.

The result of all this work over an almost three decade period is the Mini Reef.  There are almost 4,000 Mini Reefs in the water today with almost 200 million hours of combined time in the water.  This amounts to about 145.635 billion gallons of water filtered and over 6.6 million fish, crabs and shrimp grown.  As the Mini Reef continues to work away tirelessly new designs are testing and becoming available.  More residential as well as commercial units will be delivered in the coming months and years.