To those living on our coastlines green, red or brown unhealthy waters have become the norm.  Many different ideas about fixing these issues have come and gone but little progress has been made.  Now with few fish and waters so polluted they sometimes cause a health threat to people it's time to make a change and improve the health of our coastal waters.  One concept of how to accomplish part of this large job is an invention called the Mini Reef produced by Ocean Habitats.

Ocean Habitats has worked on the Mini Reef as an aquaculture experiment since the mid 1990's.  The device's original purpose was to grow thousands of fish and crabs every year.  After $500,000 of grant funded research and over 65,000 hours of staff and volunteer work the initial prototype was developed.   Well over 300 failed designs had produced over 34 functioning systems that had residential or commercial applications were developed.

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 the time came to bring this work back to life to help bring coastal waters back to life.

The result of all this work over an almost three decade period is the Mini Reef.  There are over 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.