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Two Queensland companies from disparate industries are joining forces to improve our understanding of coral lifecycles with the help of AI, marking a world-first traceability system that will aid coral farming and ultimately larger-scale reef rehabilitation efforts.
Bundaberg-based Monsoon Aquatics is Australia’s largest supplier of wild-caught and aquaculture coral, fish and marine life, with its commercial business that supplies aquariums complemented by continuous research, innovation and collaboration with industry experts.
Monsoon Aquatics reinvests profits from the sale of ethically sourced marine life to advance coral aquaculture practices, and in recent years has been scaling up land-based coral aquaculture via asexual propagation - known as 'fragging' - and coral spawning.
But one of the challenges of coral farming is understanding how to accurately and efficiently account for the lifecycle of individual corals - a process that until recently has been done through a manual, spreadsheet-based approach.
To overcome this issue, the company enlisted the help of Gold Coast-based cloud managed services group TechConnect to develop a software solution that is being rolled out this week at Monsoon's coral reef farm tanks in Bundaberg.
The Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, designed to support Monsoon Aquatics' conservation aquaculture initiative and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), is slated for application within the Great Barrier Reef itself with the help of underwater Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
The new coral management system is reportedly capable of handling tens of thousands of records and transactions daily, and will enable Monsoon Aquatics specialists a streamlined way to track and analyse detailed attributes for each coral, ensuring clear visibility and consistency throughout its lifecycle.
This migration to an automated, real-time system is also expected to help Monsoon Aquatics meet regulatory compliance requirements, delivering ready data on a range of variables such as mortality rates, exports, and current coral counts, as well as automating coral identification through digital scanning and delivering live insights into coral health and development.
TechConnect created and presented its solution to Monsoon Aquatics in September after collaboration began in early 2025, where both parties identified a range of opportunities to harness AI-based automation and database management.
In early trials, the TechConnect solution has already enabled Monsoon Aquatics to reduce the hours required to capture key information by at least five hours a week, as manual spreadsheets give way to streamlined digital processes.
For the longer term, the platform is expected to give the Monsoon Aquatics research team reliable, high-resolution data to refine coral farming processes and scale aquaculture solutions for reef restoration, while also supporting future genomics work to better understand coral traits, resilience patterns, and lineage.
"Coral Aquaculture is in its infancy; there is tremendous potential for digital solutions and AI to improve the space and the outcomes for the reef. There are many possible collaborations with TechConnect that we don’t even realise yet," says Monsoon Aquatics director Daniel Kimberley.
"By partnering with TechConnect, we have already reduced manual effort by at least five hours per week through digitising our coral analysis processes and removing spreadsheet-driven workflows.
"As we will start to introduce advanced automation and AI capabilities into the platform, we expect to unlock even greater efficiency gains, scale our analysis further, and improve data accuracy and better decision-making."
TechConnect CEO Mike Cunningham says that as an Australian company, his team are excited to be able to play a small part in supporting the success and growth of Monsoon Aquatics.
"We are proud to be collaborating with Monsoon Aquatics, to not only provide an industry leading solution but to support their role in preserving one of the world’s most iconic environments," Cunningham says.
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