By Ariel Barkhurst, Sun Sentinel

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.

That’s one of the reasons Nova Southeastern University built the new, 86,000-square-foot facility with 15 laboratories at the park. The Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Ecosystem Research, billed by the university as the country’s largest coral ref research facitlity, was built in part with a $15 million federal grant.

The grand opening ceremony is scheduled for Thursday.

The new facility is bigger than Nova’s old reef research facility, has room for more scientists and is nearer to the reefs they study, said Shira Anteby, a second-year graduate student working on sponges. The large microbiology and genetics lab headed by Jose Lopez has a sponge sample tacked on the wall, next to a Sponge Bob Square Pants toy.

“It allows us to incorporate all kinds of different research into one space — genetics, microbiology — and combine them,” Anteby said. “There’s more lab space for seminars. And we can go out, pick up samples, and come back to the lab in a few minutes.”

The same study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that estimated the value of coral reefs in tourism dollars also found that the reefs sustain about 71,000 jobs in South Florida, drawing tourists for snorkeling, diving and boat tours who eat in restaurants and sleep in hotels.

Coral is also key in keeping waves from eroding beaches too much, Lopez said. Without coral, local governments would have to do expensive beach renourishment projects more often.

“They’re valuable both ecologically and economically,” said Richard Dodge, dean of the NSU Oceanographic Center.

Nova’s new research center aims to make discoveries that will suggest better management and conservation strategies for struggling coral reefs around the world, he said.

Some features of the new center that NSU didn’t have before:

Large open-air saltwater tanks for growing coral indigenous to Broward County‘s waters for research and transplants when the reefs are in trouble;

A marina and scuba diving facility right at Port Everglades;

Saltwater tanks that can be manipulated for temperature, water acidity and pollutants so that the effects of those factors on coral and other life can be studied.

New discoveries have already been made at the center, though only a few researchers have set up their labs.

Lopez and his students discovered a new bacteria that lives in sponges and is related to cholera, he said. His team is working to understand what tiny creatures live in what sponges in what circumstances, in order to establish sponges as a gauge of reef health.

Tamara Frank, who researches the eyes of creatures that live in the dark depths, discovered that some kinds of coral-dwelling, deep-sea crabs have eyes sensitive to enough kinds of light that they can see the plankton they rely on for food. The finding was reported earlier this month in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Centers like this are important for coral reefs around the globe, Lopez said.

“Reefs are dying around the world faster than we can figure out why,” he said. “Global warning, pollution, ocean acidification. … We need to be studying this stuff.”

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