 It's a really magical place in here the little fish sometimes they're sitting on it I've seen some nibbling off the little tufts of algae yeah I think they are enjoying it it's a good sign. I was looking at a lot of restoration activities happening in the ocean being made of concrete I thought why can't you make something out of calcium carbonate surely there's a way that you can you can get it to work in this environment because shells and corals do it all the time so this is the earth marine science coral reef tank I'm testing to see what algae grow on my substrates we're trying to look at if crustose coralline algae will settle on it these are 3d printed using a ceramic 3d printer so it's printed from the base here and then it just 3d prints really slowly up through there it doesn't have any plastics or resin in it and it has a pretty low co2 footprint it's pretty cool to be able to have another a different material potentially these are just going to guide further research so they're just trying to give an indication of of where to go next and what avenues to kind of explore this is the biomaterial I've developed and at the moment I'm exploring the different possibilities of and manufacturing processes it can go through so it's made out of ingredients that are found within the reef system already that's what makes it really really interesting is that you know a fish could eat it and it will just return to the environment so we've got the first test piece out of the 3d printer I basically spent four months making failed experiments where all of my substrates were dissolving in my little test I had little test tanks it was kind of by a little bit of chance that this kind of worked it was really really exciting to kind of open the kiln and go oh this looks cool so the crustose corolline algae might take a little bit longer but at the moment we have some green turf algae growing so you can see that here little tops and yeah I think so far they're doing they're holding up pretty well it kind of the way that I'm going about the experimentation is very scientific but I'm it's also experimental in a design sense so it's kind of combining those two things it has been so much fun it's kind of this is what I love to kind of do is take something and take an idea and just experiment and manipulate and and change things and see all the different variations you can make with a very simple material