The Coral Reef Laboratory

The Coral Reef Laboratory propogates and studies more than 40 species of cnidarians in a multi-compartment aquarium system circulating more than 4200 litres of artificial seawater. The laboratory hosts representatives of actiniaria, ceriantharia, octocorallia, corallimorpharia and sclearactinia including 12 Acropora species.

The aquarium system allows experimentation under tightly controlled conditions. It also includes the Coral Reef Tank in the reception area of NOCS.

The laboratory's activities include:

• Applying genomic and proteomic approaches to understand the response of reef corals to environmental stress.
• Evolving fluorescent reef coral pigments into advanced imaging tools for biomedical reserach.
• Studying the role of coral pigments in the photobiology of hermatypic corals and their symbiotic algae.
• Exploring the function of fluorescent proteins in deep-water and azooxanthellate invertebrates.
• Field studies to complement the laboratory experimentation.

The laboratory is headed by Dr Jörg Wiedenmann.