In a $50 million five-story brick and glass building in John U. Lloyd Beach State Park, researchers are taking the biomass of crustaceans to help study the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, cultivating asexual staghorn coral and sequencing the genomes of sponges.

The answers they discover will help preserve an ecological resource - coral reefs and the life they support - that brings about $6 billion in tourism annually to five South Florida counties, including Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to a federal study.

via "A huge coral reef research center will open on Thursday at Nova Southeastern University" - Sun Sentinel (Note: Link no longer exists. See related news here and here).