FLORIDA KEYS / CORAL / INSPIRATION
Ken
Nedimyer
Keep growing
the next reef.
By Rob Urban
Ken Nedimyer’s coral-restoration work has an origin that sounds almost modest beside its consequences: he noticed something growing.
While working with live rock for the aquarium trade in the Florida Keys, he found young staghorn corals settling on it. In a 2025 profile for Divers Alert Network, he described how that observation led to an ocean-based coral farm with his daughter, who was involved in 4-H. The project began with the aquarium trade in mind. It became a way to ask whether growing coral could help repair damaged reefs.
Nedimyer already had years of practical experience with marine animals. Collecting tropical fish and diving for lobster had helped pay for college; aquaculture later supported his family. He brought that working knowledge to a problem whose scale was much larger than a fish tank.
The father-and-daughter beginning is a detail I like. There was room to try something, watch closely, and discover that the useful question was changing. A project could become more ambitious because the living things in front of them were showing what might be possible.
A nursery
is also a place
to learn.
Reef Renewal USA’s history traces Nedimyer’s development of nursery and outplanting techniques through his founding of Coral Restoration Foundation and his later work in reef renewal. It also credits Michael Echevarria, who helped establish Reef Renewal USA in 2019 after working with Nedimyer at CRF. Nedimyer serves as technical director, guiding the science and permitting for coral nursery and planting activities.
Those distinctions matter because this is a field built by many people over time. Nedimyer’s contribution includes practical methods that other organizations can use, along with the continuing work of revising those methods. The nursery is a place to grow coral and a place to learn how to grow it better.
There is a great deal hidden inside the simple phrase “planting coral.” Someone has to choose the material, raise it, care for it, decide where it belongs, and return to find out what happened. The ocean supplies no guarantee that yesterday’s successful method will work under tomorrow’s conditions.
The difficult part of this story is precisely that conditions keep changing. A person could reasonably devote a career to perfecting one technique and still find that the environment now demands another.
When the water
got too hot.
The 2023 marine heat wave put that reality in immediate view. Reporting from the Florida Keys during the emergency described organizations moving nursery corals into land-based facilities and deeper water. Nedimyer credited sanctuary staff and other agencies for speeding the permission needed to establish new nursery sites.
Reef Renewal’s response depended on a substantial group effort. Divers, aquarium staff, local businesses, and other restoration teams helped move and protect coral. Nedimyer described roughly 20 divers making repeated dives over six days. Donated tanks and air fills were part of the rescue, alongside scientific expertise.
That is a revealing picture of conservation in an emergency. It requires people who understand the biology, people who can operate underwater, and people who can supply the very ordinary equipment that keeps the work moving. A generous idea is useful. So is a filled dive tank when the next boat leaves.
The response also makes it impossible to tell Nedimyer’s story as a tidy sequence of victories. The reef suffered severe losses. The work continued with those losses in view, requiring changes in how coral was protected and grown.
The destination stays.
The route can change.
Reef Renewal USA’s current approach combines offshore nurseries near Tavernier and Big Pine Key with a land-based coral farm in Ruskin. The organization describes the farm as both a production facility and a living gene bank, preserving a collection of more than 1,000 coral genotypes across 21 species.
Its work includes propagation from fragments and sexual reproduction, with scientific advisers contributing expertise in genetics, aquaculture, veterinary care, and marine biology. The aim is to maintain diversity while producing corals suited to difficult conditions. These are continuing restoration efforts, with survival and growth to be measured after planting.
The move onto land is an interesting turn for a career so closely associated with diving. It puts more of the growing process in a controlled setting and draws on aquaculture skills. The destination remains the reef, but the route can change.
As Mikki McComb-Kobza’s 2025 profile explains, the Ruskin operation also opened the effort to fish farmers and people who do not dive. Years spent raising marine animals became useful again in a different setting.
I admire that readiness to revise. When a technique carries your name or reputation, it can become difficult to let a different approach take the lead. Nedimyer keeps returning to the living thing the method is supposed to serve. If coral needs another kind of nursery, then the nursery can change.
That offers a reason for hope I can trust. The people doing the work are still paying attention, still learning from what survives, and still finding useful skills in one another.
Let the coral
set the pace.
The team also keeps asking smaller questions. In an account of nursery growth data, Upper Keys Restoration Program Director Shane Wever describes differences among species and seasons. In the dataset he discusses, growth was strongest between March and August, with knobby brain coral growing faster than the star corals studied. Such observations help the team plan when corals may be ready for planting and when colonies might eventually reproduce.
This is the patient work underneath the striking photographs. It asks for measurements, comparisons, and a willingness to revise a schedule because the coral has supplied better information.
AQUARIUS / 2016
An unusual assignment
from NASA.
One episode in Nedimyer’s career puts that practical ingenuity in a very different setting. For the NEEMO 21 mission in 2016, he helped develop a coral-nursery construction task for aquanauts training at the Aquarius habitat off the Keys.
The team would work in hardhat diving equipment with limited mobility. Materials and assembly methods familiar to ordinary scuba divers would not necessarily work with heavy gloves or inside the habitat. Nedimyer had to redesign the nursery equipment around those constraints and help prepare the mission participants.
The aquanauts established two nurseries, which were monitored afterward. Hurricane Irma destroyed them in 2017. That ending belongs in the account: a successful training and construction exercise did not make the structures immune to a storm.
The episode also connects his work with the underwater training world that Nicole Stott experienced earlier in her astronaut career. Florida’s coast can be a place to prepare for space and a place to work on the future of life underwater.
Nedimyer’s career keeps returning to that second task. He notices what survives, works out how to grow more of it, and shares the effort with people whose skills differ from his own. The next reef will need all of that attention.
About Ken Nedimyer’s work
What is Ken Nedimyer’s role in coral restoration?
Ken Nedimyer pioneered coral nursery and outplanting methods, founded the Coral Restoration Foundation, and serves as technical director of Reef Renewal USA.
Where does Reef Renewal USA grow coral?
Reef Renewal USA describes offshore nurseries near Tavernier and Big Pine Key, along with a land-based coral farm and living gene bank in Ruskin, Florida.
How did Ken Nedimyer work with NASA’s NEEMO mission?
For NEEMO 21 in 2016, Nedimyer developed coral nursery equipment and helped train aquanauts to assemble nurseries near the Aquarius underwater habitat. Hurricane Irma destroyed those nurseries in 2017.
Sources: Reef Renewal USA’s history, nursery methods, growth observations and NEEMO account; Mikki McComb-Kobza’s August 2025 Alert Diver profile for Divers Alert Network; and Tiffany Duong’s August 2023 Keys Weekly reporting. Current program descriptions checked September 2026. Restoration aims are described as continuing work, with outcomes still to be measured. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
For more writing about the people and ideas I find worth paying attention to, or a conversation about your own work, meet Rob.