The conservation thesis behind every frag
Every captive-propagated colony sold is a colony not taken from a reef, and wild collection still happens at real scale. CITES records show about 1.4 million wild-caught stony corals moving in international trade in 2021. That's down from a peak of 3.1 million in 2007, but it's still well over a million animals cut off live reefs in a single year.1 Queensland's fishery took roughly 620,000 pieces that year, and Indonesia's permitted harvest was roughly 411,000 live corals.2 3 4 A farm that makes captive stock cheaper and more available than wild-caught coral pulls that demand away from reefs, and the effect gets stronger as the business grows, not weaker. That's also what the trade analysis itself concludes: it recommends incentivizing cultivation as a reef-protection measure.1
All stony corals are CITES Appendix II. At CoP20 in Samarkand (late 2025), the Parties adopted amended definitions for coral “born in captivity” and “bred in captivity,” each requiring a minimum of 50% new growth after cutting, and directed a working group to build out chain-of-custody guidance.5 6 That's the traceability needed to tell wild, farmed, and captive-bred material apart in trade. Every tightening of wild harvest raises the value of documented, aquacultured, clean-provenance stock, which is good for us and for the reefs. We'd rather be regulated than not, as long as we stay on the right side of the line and can prove it.
Three roadmap items, staged rather than launched at once
Phase 1 is the farm itself. Hobby revenue funds and de-risks each stage that follows, which is why we're staging this instead of launching everything at once. The three conservation lines below are where we're headed once that foundation is proven. None of them is something we offer today.
Roadmap: Phase 2
Secure Conservation Holding
Fee-for-service, redundant, off-site holding for institutions that can't risk a single point of failure: research collections, restoration programs, rescue networks. There is precedent for the model. Florida's coral rescue holds roughly 3,000 corals across 25 land-based facilities in 14 states, most of them nowhere near an ocean.7 A multi-day power failure is the loss scenario we design against, which is why the energy resilience described below is the real credential behind this offer.
- Title always stays with the depositor. ACG never owns conservation stock
- Hard biosecurity firewall: deposited specimens never share water, tools, or hands with our commercial stock
- Recall on demand, at the depositor's cost, unconditionally
- Held as redundancy, not a guarantee: no survival guarantee, liability capped
Roadmap: Phase 3
Ex-Situ Sexual Reproduction & Thermal-Tolerance Selection
We're in Michigan. There is no ocean here, so the in-situ half of coral restoration is permanently out of reach for us: diving a wild spawning event for gametes, outplanting seeding units onto a reef. We're not going to pretend otherwise. What a closed system is uniquely good at is the half that needs control rather than proximity, inducing predictable broadcast spawning under simulated photoperiod, lunar cycle, seasonal temperature, and irradiance. That method was worked out in a building in London: the Horniman Museum's Project Coral cracked predictable closed-system spawning in 2013 and published the protocol open-source,8 9 and systems built on it have since gone to 19 institutions across 12 countries. Land-based labs on that model supply larvae, settled recruits, and reproductive data to coastal partners who do the outplanting. That's the role available to us.
- Indo-Pacific ornamental broodstock only. The Caribbean restoration-priority species are ESA-listed and aren't ours to work with
- The reef end belongs to partners with a coastline. The Florida Aquarium raised thousands of recruits off this method; we'd be upstream of work like that, not claiming to do it
- Thermal-tolerance selection on captive lineages, measured against controls rather than asserted
- Protocols and failure data published either way. The method we'd be using is open-source because someone else published theirs
Roadmap: Phase 4
Breeding What Nobody Breeds Yet
Captive propagation only displaces wild collection for animals someone has actually closed the life cycle on. CORAL Magazine and the Marine Breeding Initiative keep the running list, 468 species as of the 2023 edition,10 and the animals this hobby wants most are conspicuously missing from it. Moving one species onto that list is a permanent reduction in collection pressure, and unlike outplanting, it's work a controlled inland system is genuinely suited to. We're staging it by what's actually reachable, hardest last.
- Near term, ornamental invertebrates. Cleaner and fire shrimp have been bred but not reliably; the bottleneck is a long, variable larval period and low larval survival.11 Harlequin shrimp were closed in a research lab in 2018 and still aren't something you can buy captive-bred.12 These need tank space and patience more than they need a coastline
- Grazers and cleanup crews. Trochus and cerith are aquacultured already; astraea, turbo snails, and urchins are still overwhelmingly wild-collected, and they sell by the dozen. Nobody will be impressed, but it's the easiest real win on this list
- Mid term, sexual propagation of ornamental coral. It shares its infrastructure with Phase 3, which is what would let Phase 3 pay for itself instead of running on goodwill
- Long horizon, pelagic-spawning fish. The marquee gaps (Moorish idol, Achilles and powder blue tangs, most butterflyfish) need a copepod hatchery, a dedicated larval room, and years of failures. We'd do that with a university partner or not at all
- Every attempt gets written up, including the ones that die. Someone else's published failure would have saved us time more than once, so we'll return the favor
Solar, battery, and an honest net-zero boundary
Our footprint comes down mostly to electricity, so energy is the one sustainability claim we can back up with a meter reading. Solar and battery capacity matter for more than the carbon math: a multi-day outage is the loss scenario we plan around hardest, so the same system that cuts our footprint is what keeps livestock, and any future deposited specimens, alive when the grid goes down.
Our net-zero goal is deliberately narrow: an operational Scope 1–2 commitment over a 10–15 year horizon, covering our own electricity and on-site fuel use, sized and measured against actual meter data. Scope 3, mainly air-freighting live coral, is carbon-intensive and largely outside our control, and we're not going to claim it away. Instead we're addressing it directly: renewable, low-biomass shipping materials, larval shipping once that capability comes online, and consolidating freight where we can.
A real commitment, stated honestly
We're working out a specific, net-based giving pledge (not a cut of gross revenue) to an established conservation nonprofit. That's a near-term goal we haven't locked down yet. Coral cost-of-goods is brutal, so a percentage of gross revenue can eat a large share of actual profit; we'd rather commit to a number we can honor every year than advertise a vague "portion of proceeds" that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Once the pledge is finalized, the percentage and the organization will be published here, in the open.
In the meantime, the conservation work that costs nothing is already underway: propagating ecologically meaningful stock to displace wild demand, and publishing husbandry and survivorship data that's hard to find anywhere else in this hobby.
Check our numbers
Every figure on this page links to where it came from. Where we've only been able to find a secondary source, we say so rather than dressing it up as a primary one.
- An unseen threat to coral reef biodiversity: the international trade of live corals for the aquarium industry as reflected by CITES records (1990–2021)Hoeksema, B. Ocean & Coastal Management, vol. 276, art. 108111 · 2026
- Cash for Corals: Exploiting Ecosystems on Their Way to ExtinctionThe Revelator. Secondary source for the Queensland and Indonesia figures; we have not been able to confirm either against a primary fisheries document, which is why both are hedged · 2023
- Queensland Coral Fishery Harvest Strategy 2021–2026Fisheries Queensland, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries · 2021
- Non-Detriment Finding for CITES-Listed Corals in IndonesiaCITES · 2023
- CoP20 Doc. 66.2, Trade in stony corals: proposed amendments to Annex 1 of Resolution Conf. 11.10 (Rev. CoP15), submitted by Australia and adopted as amendedCITES Conference of the Parties, Samarkand · 2025
- CITES CoP20 summary, 23 November – 5 December 2025Earth Negotiations Bulletin, IISD · 2025
- Florida Coral RescueFlorida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Roughly 3,000 corals across 25 land-based facilities in 14 states · ongoing
- Inducing broadcast coral spawning ex situ: closed system mesocosm design and husbandry protocolCraggs, J. et al. Ecology and Evolution · 2017
- Project CoralHorniman Museum and Gardens, London · 2012–present
- CORAL Magazine's Captive-Bred Marine Aquarium Fish & Invertebrate ListCORAL Magazine and the Marine Breeding Initiative · 2023 edition
- Overview of the Marine Ornamental Cleaner Shrimp, Lysmata amboinensis (De Man, 1888)Kumar, T. et al. Journal of Aquaculture & Fisheries, 8:090 · 2024
- Ornamental Shrimp: Dentist of the deep now commercially bredVirginia Sea Grant. Five species closed at Virginia Tech's Seafood AREC, including harlequin shrimp · 2018