This paper introduces a new hybrid bio-inspired solver which combines elements from the recently proposed Coral Reefs Optimization (CRO) algorithm with operators from the Harmony Search (HS) approach, which gives rise to the coined CRO-HS optimization technique. Specifically, this novel bioinspired optimizer is utilized in the context of short-term wind speed prediction as a means to obtain the best set of meteorological variables to be input to a neural Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) network. The paper elaborates on the main characteristics of the proposed scheme and discusses its performance when predicting the wind speed based on the measures of two meteorological towers located in USA and Spain. The good results obtained in these experiments when compared to na ve versions of the CRO and HS algorithms are promising and pave the way towards the utilization of the derived hybrid solver in other optimization problems arising from diverse disciplines. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.