Throughout the world, most coral nurseries focus on in-water production of fast-growing branching species to relatively small sizes for outplanting; alternatively, the State of Hawaii has implemented an innovative program which focuses on land-based propagation of slow-growing Ha waiian coral species into large-sized colonies for outplanting . By collecting small (10 - 15 cm) coral colonies or fragments from within public harbors and using microfragmentation and advanced aquarium husbandry techniques, the State's land-based Coral Restoration Nursery can create large-sized (42 cm and 1+ m) massive colonies in a fraction of the time (1 year) it would take to occur naturally in Hawaii (20+ years, 100+ years respectively).
The resulting large colony modules are then placed onto degraded natural Hawaiian coral reefs in an effort to restore these reefs back towards their earlier ecologically-complex state. The outplanted colonies are evaluated using the State's Coral Ecological Services and Functions Tool and the resulting offset can be used by developers and Responsible Parties to pay for coral and habitat loss incurred elsewhere in Hawaii. The result is a dynamic program to put out large, live, fully-covered coral colonies; paid for without large expenditures of public monies, and without the extremely long natural recovery rates (one year instead of decades) for large corals normally seen in Hawaii. The program is now expanding to focus on even larger corals, extremely rare coral species, and large upright branching species, to re-introduce them back into the wild using similar mechanisms.