Dueling 80s

[StinkyBunny]

An executive decision has been made. We've been fighting this green slime shit now for over 8 months in M's tank. It's going to be taken apart and the fish and corals moved to other tanks and hers turned into a freshwater planted tank. Stay tuned for pictarz and details.

[StinkyBunny]

Gravel is on its way and the tank will be drained and cleaned this weekend. We were looking through my old fish books and I saw a lot of oldies and on the availability out of Indo there's a shitgob of new stuff. A kid I grew up with went back home to Indonesia, he and I raised all sorts of fish when we were kids. I went into the service, he went back home and another friend went into the Peace Corps and landed in The Solomons. Gary is breeding 33 different Rasboras, a bunch of Tetras, Gouramis, sharks, catfish  and Cichlids. I don't think we'll be doing much with cichlids though.

[StinkyBunny]

Jesus, this shit's adding up quick for her tank, lol.

$120 for gravel

$190 for rock

$110 for driftwood

$300 for lights

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

Merry Christmas to you and the family 🙂🙂

[righttirefire]

I didn't know you had a tank. I figured it was a bathtub

[StinkyBunny]

Well, M's tank has nothing but water and sand in it now. Gonna vacuum out the gravel tomorrow and start getting it squared away for the change. Everyone made the switch to their new house without too much drama. Jerry the Springer's damsel and one of the Green Chromis were the only ones to give up a good fight. The gravel and some of the wood has arrived, the rest is due in next week. A HUGE thanks to @Marine Depot for yet again going above and beyond getting my order out ahead of what I had scheduled. Great folks to deal with!!

[StinkyBunny]

[StinkyBunny]

So, yea, we did a thing. M's new tank is up and running with a few critters added to kick start the cycle.

 

Betty the Betta

 

 

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

2 hours ago, StinkyBunny said:

So, yea, we did a thing. M's new tank is up and running with a few critters added to kick start the cycle.

 

Betty the Betta

 

 

Hey that looks good👍👍

[StinkyBunny]

My tank is on autopilot. It's been chugging along growing zoanthids and leathers well. Found a piece of Montipora that must have some in on one of the Vietnam rocks in the last shipment. I dunno what it is yet, it's a reddish brown thing.

[StinkyBunny]

In the coming year we will be focusing a lot more attention on freshwater aquariums than marine. The writing is on the wall and it doesn't look good. There are only 2 places shipping corals right now, Tonga and Australia and I see Australia shutting down. If that happens Tonga won't be able to keep up with demand, right now there's about a 2 week wait from them to get bread and butter corals. I've been ordering like mad to bring in things for myself and to sell, but you're on allotments so you get screwed if you don't place the orders early. It doesn't look good for the future of the hobby. Vietnam has some really nice soft corals, zoanthids, toadstools, finger leathers and mushrooms, but no hard corals to the USA. Now everyone will see all of the chop shops go tits up, if anyone thinks that wasn't the way the hobby was run, you're blind. Coral prices will be increasing in the coming year. Sorry to be the voice of gloom and doom, but it is what it is.  We've added 60 more 40B tanks to the freshwater side, I may break down one of the marine fish systems and bring in wild African cichlids, don't know yet.

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

Wow and I'm just getting into saltwater ☹️. Well I hope you do good with freshwater, I can't wait to see the tanks you design 🙂. Honestly, I love my African cichlids and I'll be sad to see them go.

I just got my shipment of snails and my emerald crab, crab is already going to town on the GHA 🙂

[Lula_Mae]

3 hours ago, StinkyBunny said:

In the coming year we will be focusing a lot more attention on freshwater aquariums than marine. The writing is on the wall and it doesn't look good. There are only 2 places shipping corals right now, Tonga and Australia and I see Australia shutting down. If that happens Tonga won't be able to keep up with demand, right now there's about a 2 week wait from them to get bread and butter corals. I've been ordering like mad to bring in things for myself and to sell, but you're on allotments so you get screwed if you don't place the orders early. It doesn't look good for the future of the hobby. Vietnam has some really nice soft corals, zoanthids, toadstools, finger leathers and mushrooms, but no hard corals to the USA. Now everyone will see all of the chop shops go tits up, if anyone thinks that wasn't the way the hobby was run, you're blind. Coral prices will be increasing in the coming year. Sorry to be the voice of gloom and doom, but it is what it is.  We've added 60 more 40B tanks to the freshwater side, I may break down one of the marine fish systems and bring in wild African cichlids, don't know yet.

Will that be all corals, or more for hard corals?  I've always bought bitty frags and assumed they were propagated in someone's tank (pico life lol), except for things like gorgs and rics.  Crazy to see such dramatic changes taking place.

[StinkyBunny]

12 minutes ago, Lula_Mae said:

Will that be all corals, or more for hard corals?  I've always bought bitty frags and assumed they were propagated in someone's tank (pico life lol), except for things like gorgs and rics.  Crazy to see such dramatic changes taking place.

There are quite a few corals that are aquacultured, but I'm guessing about 50% are from chop shops. There was a huge one just north of me. It's all economics. I have a few people that buy whole colonies from me and chop them up. Fiji had some great maricultured colonies that were perfect for this. There are quite a few farms in Indonesia as well, we just can't get stock from them right now. Great strides are still being made and they will still be made. I'm just stating what I see from where I stand. You can bring in a box of corals and make a few dollars on them or you can chop them up and make a boat load off them. I hope that we can get to a point where we figure out breeding strategies so we can sell true captive bred corals. I'm all for captive propagation of corals, much to the chagrin of others in the business that frown on it, they say it's taking money out of their pocket. Well, it is and it isn't. If we can take pressure off the reefs it's a win win for everyone. Look at it right now, no new colours or species are available to us. If we're taking less, maybe we'll be able to take a lesser amount for a longer period of time and get some new specimens to grow and propagate. If you don't look at it as a long term venture and just a quick money grab for the here and now you're going to end up broke.

 

 My reason for the partial change to freshwater is there is nothing around us but big box stores which carry basics and the coral shut downs, like I said, the writing's on the wall. Another revenue stream is another motivation. I want to carry all of the oddballs as well as quality plants from SE Asia. I've been thinking about adding freshwater for a while now. I have done a few transship shipments of African cichlids, but they're few and far between. It's a trend I think we're going to see more in the industry. Hell, I know of 3 African suppliers that also sell freshwater fish along side of their marine fish, I bring in some freshwater out of Africa as transship only. This is going to be in the next 6 months, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be tended to, racks, tanks, lighting and I'm going to need another 300gpd RO/DI capacity. The one I have now (300gpd) is tapped out and runs 24/7/365, the only time it gets shut down is for maintenance.

[teenyreef]

Good luck with the FW stuff! I've kept FW tank for the last 45 years or so, although I never got into the whole African and/or exotic thing. By the time I wanted to put real money into a tank I spent it all on saltwater.

[Lula_Mae]

1 hour ago, StinkyBunny said:

There are quite a few corals that are aquacultured, but I'm guessing about 50% are from chop shops. There was a huge one just north of me. It's all economics. I have a few people that buy whole colonies from me and chop them up. Fiji had some great maricultured colonies that were perfect for this. There are quite a few farms in Indonesia as well, we just can't get stock from them right now. Great strides are still being made and they will still be made. I'm just stating what I see from where I stand. You can bring in a box of corals and make a few dollars on them or you can chop them up and make a boat load off them. I hope that we can get to a point where we figure out breeding strategies so we can sell true captive bred corals. I'm all for captive propagation of corals, much to the chagrin of others in the business that frown on it, they say it's taking money out of their pocket. Well, it is and it isn't. If we can take pressure off the reefs it's a win win for everyone. Look at it right now, no new colours or species are available to us. If we're taking less, maybe we'll be able to take a lesser amount for a longer period of time and get some new specimens to grow and propagate. If you don't look at it as a long term venture and just a quick money grab for the here and now you're going to end up broke.

 

 My reason for the partial change to freshwater is there is nothing around us but big box stores which carry basics and the coral shut downs, like I said, the writing's on the wall. Another revenue stream is another motivation. I want to carry all of the oddballs as well as quality plants from SE Asia. I've been thinking about adding freshwater for a while now. I have done a few transship shipments of African cichlids, but they're few and far between. It's a trend I think we're going to see more in the industry. Hell, I know of 3 African suppliers that also sell freshwater fish along side of their marine fish, I bring in some freshwater out of Africa as transship only. This is going to be in the next 6 months, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be tended to, racks, tanks, lighting and I'm going to need another 300gpd RO/DI capacity. The one I have now (300gpd) is tapped out and runs 24/7/365, the only time it gets shut down is for maintenance.

Good points, thanks for the explanation.  We definitely need to try to take some pressure off the reefs where we can.  Long-term planning, kind of like planning for retirement except planning for the future of the reefs and hobby, will do us all good.

 

That's a lot of RO/DI lol.

[teenyreef]

That's the part that bothers me about all this. So many people don't know or care about the difference between corals harvested from reefs and maricultured corals harvested from farms. And so the long term effect is to prevent the farmers from doing legal business, and driving up prices which encourages more unscrupulous/illegal harvesting from natural reefs.

 

Same equation that results from making drugs illegal.

 

Oops, politics.

[StinkyBunny]

People don't have a clue teeny, not even a little bit of a clue about it. When I first got back into reef tanks I thought it was mostly propagated stuff too until I went to NYC and saw 100 boxes of wild Indo corals coming in every week. I knew then what they were doing. The industry is getting there, but we still have a way to go. Quite a bit of the SPS corals are captive propagated, it's the LPS we need to work on. I'd guess that 70% of the SPS are captive propagated or maricultured. We need some studies done to see what's what and the numbers of wild and maricultured to see where we stand.

[teenyreef]

Interesting that this article came out just today, talking about mariculture vs wild coral collection in Indonesia, which is exactly what we are talking about too 🙂

 

https://reefbuilders.com/2019/01/10/indonesian-coral-farmer-association-is-born/?utm_source=Reef+Builders+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dc13f2d0fd-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_88f38223c1-dc13f2d0fd-432705665

[StinkyBunny]

7 hours ago, teenyreef said:

Interesting that this article came out just today, talking about mariculture vs wild coral collection in Indonesia, which is exactly what we are talking about too 🙂

 

https://reefbuilders.com/2019/01/10/indonesian-coral-farmer-association-is-born/?utm_source=Reef+Builders+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dc13f2d0fd-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_88f38223c1-dc13f2d0fd-432705665

Yep, I bet fisheries minister has to have an armed guard around her at all times. The Indonesians are known for this shit too, every 10 years someone isn't getting enough money and they halt coral exports until they get a bigger slice of the pie. That bottom picture is one of the farmers I buy from, top notch stuff. Oh yea, before anyone say they want that yellow acro, forget it. They turn brown in transit and never get that yellow colour back, just like Yellow Porites. I tried everything I could think of, heavy feeding, more iron and other trace minerals and stirring the sandbed once a week, nada, still brown. I always wanted to do a deeper tank with Porites and have it grow up to the surface.

[StinkyBunny]

Apparently something spawned in the zoanthid run over night. I got an alarm @ OMFG:30 that the ATO was running too long. Dunno what spawned, we'll find out in a week or so.

[StinkyBunny]

Still no idea what spawned in the run, I hope whatever did was fertile. I've had leather spawn before, but only salvaged 20 or so corals. I with they would have some sort of sign that they were about to knock boots so i could shut down the filtration and collect the eggs.

[StinkyBunny]

So yea, Tonga is shut down now. Some sort of "bacteria" issue. Doesn't look good folks.

[SeaFurn]

Thanks for all that information on the status of things in the industry over the last several posts. I find it all very interesting and wish I had the perspective you do so I could understand it better. 

It sounds like your making some good strategic moves (to FW) though, to keep the $$ coming in. Hopefully you’ll continue to post updates on that here on NR as it progresses for those of us who enjoy keeping up with you. 

[DSFIRSTSLTWATER]

4 hours ago, StinkyBunny said:

So yea, Tonga is shut down now. Some sort of "bacteria" issue. Doesn't look good folks.

That really sucks 😐... figures, I finally get into saltwater and things are gonna go to hell. Do you think that people that aquaculture them are going to jack up the prices??