Where do our coral come from?

[SAWFISH]

At this point in the hobby it seems as though everyone is constantly growing, fragging, and trading their corals. I wonder if anyone has any idea how this impacts the harvesting of wild coral for the hobby? Such as what percentage of hobbyist corals comes from the ocean nowadays and if this number has been increasing or decreasing overtime?

The reason I ask is because it seems like people are sometimes critical of the hobby’s impact on wild environments, which I can understand. At the same tome though I feel as though I never see any corals marketed as wild caught and I imagine most if not all frags are aquacultured or from other hobbyists.Just wondering if anyone has more detailed information on these topics.

Thank You
SAWFISH

 

[revhtree]

Bump!

 

[Auquanut]

Great topic! It would be interesting to see any factual data on the impact of aquaculture on wild coral harvesting. I would think that over the last 10 years or so, the impact would be pretty significant.

 

[SAWFISH]

Great topic! It would be interesting to see any factual data on the impact of aquaculture on wild coral harvesting. I would think that over the last 10 years or so, the impact would be pretty significant.

That is along the lines of what I was thinking. Even here far from any ocean, in Columbus Ohio there is a greenhouse facility dedicated to growing corals for hobbyist. I believe around 90% of the corals on their website are grown in the greenhouse. Really awesome place to shop if you are ever in the area

Reef Systems Coral Farm, Inc.

Reef Systems Coral Farm, Inc.

reefsystems.com

I wonder if big brands like WWC, liveaquaria, etc also work to grow corals in house rather than harvesting

 

[fish farmer]

Back 20 years ago I would venture to guess some of my corals were wild caught, I had a brain coral the size of an orange, doubt that was aquacultured.

It would be nice to see some type of supply chain knowledge on whether it was wild/mari/land based cultured. I know some places do say that in their advertising.

 

[SAWFISH]

I remembered that I had seen this infographic before. It says you need a Membership but you can click to log in as a guest. The group essentially is trying to estimate the size of the aquarium trade, and they have at least some numbers for the number of various species/families of animals being sent to the US each year. To get this data just click on the US. It will also tell you what countries these animals are comming from and to what ports of entry they arrive at within the US. If anyone has any trouble getting it to work just let me know and I will just take screenshots and post them

AquariumTradeData - Marine Aquarium Biodiversity and Trade Flow

Aquariumtradedata.org is a commitment to understanding the diversity and magnitude of the marine aquarium trade by illuminating and evaluating the global shipping pathways of the trade.

www.aquariumtradedata.org

EDIT: I should also note that this website just tells how corals are being moved around the world, upon closer inspection I do not think that it only counts wild corals. So it could very well be that many of the corals listed on this site are aquacultured. Despite that it is still a pretty cool tool to see how corals are moved around the world

 

[SAWFISH]

If I am understanding correctly since this tool began being used cnidarians (the phylum including corals) made up only 10% of the animals being shipped to the US. This accounts for about 1,309,000 individual cnidarians being sent over. If I had to guess most of these were coral colonies but that is just my conjecturing based on the ratio of anemones to corals in the hobby. The tool also only recorded data from 2005 to 2011. So it is of a somewhat limited use. The top 2 countries sending marine animals to the US were the Philippines and Indonesia

 

[PatW]

Quite a few corals are aquacultured. If you order online, you can be sure of getting 100% aquacultured . But a good LFS will let you know. Even a fair number of fish are being raised domestically.

Corals can be taken from reefs safely if the right procedures are followed. In Fiji, they frag corals on what looks like sunken picnic tables and grow them out. They ship them off when they get an order. Done right, this can give jobs to locals and an incentive at maintaining healthy reefs.

Fish collection can also be done sustainably and give jobs to locals.

Of course, both corals and fish can be collected in a very damaging fashion.

 

[SAWFISH]

Quite a few corals are aquacultured. If you order online, you can be sure of getting 100% aquacultured . But a good LFS will let you know. Even a fair number of fish are being raised domestically.

Corals can be taken from reefs safely if the right procedures are followed. In Fiji, they frag corals on what looks like sunken picnic tables and grow them out. They ship them off when they get an order. Done right, this can give jobs to locals and an incentive at maintaining healthy reefs.

Fish collection can also be done sustainably and give jobs to locals.

Of course, both corals and fish can be collected in a very damaging fashion.

Hi Pat, thanks for the comment, what makes you so confident that most corals online are aquaculture? I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case I just wonder if you have some concrete evidence to show so!

Also I fully agree that even if corals are being harvested from the wild there is definitely a way to do it sustainably. Wild coral harvesting in itself is not bad unless it is being done sustainably!

Based on your comment I went onto LiveAquarias Divers Den and noticed that they have one section for Aquacultured corals, but also sections for LPS and SPS corals. I wonder if it would be safe to say the corals in the LPS and SPS sections are wild caught since they are not listed in the Maricultured or Aquacultured sections of the Divers Den. Additionally many of the SPS colonies have locations associated with them such as Australia or Tonga!

 

[ichthyogeek]

Hmm...most of the single polyp LPS that I know of (elegances, scolymias/homophyllias, trachyphyllias, etc.) aren't propagated in captivity. Whereas a lot of the SPS/multi-polyp LPS are, just as a side benefit of them being easily fraggable.

Essentially it boils down to "how fast does it grow" and "Can I make it reproduce asexually". If it grows fast, and you can make it reproduce asexually (i.e. frag it), then chances are high that you can buy it aquacultured.

 

[PatW]

Hi Pat, thanks for the comment, what makes you so confident that most corals online are aquaculture? I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case I just wonder if you have some concrete evidence to show so!

Also I fully agree that even if corals are being harvested from the wild there is definitely a way to do it sustainably. Wild coral harvesting in itself is not bad unless it is being done sustainably!

Based on your comment I went onto LiveAquarias Divers Den and noticed that they have one section for Aquacultured corals, but also sections for LPS and SPS corals. I wonder if it would be safe to say the corals in the LPS and SPS sections are wild caught since they are not listed in the Maricultured or Aquacultured sections of the Divers Den. Additionally many of the SPS colonies have locations associated with them such as Australia or Tonga!

I should have been more specific. There places online that only sell their own aquacultured corals like : Jason Fox, Vivid Aquariums, World Wide Corals, Top Shelf, Battlecorals and many others.

 

[SAWFISH]

I should have been more specific. There places online that only sell their own aquacultured corals like : Jason Fox, Vivid Aquariums, World Wide Corals, Top Shelf, Battlecorals and many others.

Okay that makes more sense, I could definitely see that, considering they have their own brand of coral! It would certainly make sense that WWC "insert coral name" is not from the ocean . Thank You for the clarification. On that topic it would also be cool to see the shares the each of these big companies has on our tanks. What percentage of all hobbyist corals are WWC or have that lineage etc. I imagine most would be no-name but still a fun thing to think about

 

[sfin52]

My understanding is all rfa are wild harvested.

 

[Opus]

I should have been more specific. There places online that only sell their own aquacultured corals like : Jason Fox, Vivid Aquariums, World Wide Corals, Top Shelf, Battlecorals and many others.

That is not totally true. They have to bring in wild caught to keep diversifying their stock. How many pieces of acropora do you think they went thru to get that one named piece that people are willing to pay $500/inch. Also as someone else posted, the single polyp items like scolys are wild caught. Also a lot of the Australian stuff is going to be wild caught. There are still chop shops out there, even on this board. Now how much wild caught vs aquacultured/maricultured there is I have no idea.

I do know we are no where near being able to sustain the hobby at its current level with home grown corals. I don't know of any facility that would be able to ship out thousands of frags each week to shops. Just think, one big hurricane could shut WWC down for weeks or months.

 

[SAWFISH]

My understanding is all rfa are wild harvested.

What do you mean by rfa? I am not familiar with that acronym?

 

[SAWFISH]

That is not totally true. They have to bring in wild caught to keep diversifying their stock. How many pieces of acropora do you think they went thru to get that one named piece that people are willing to pay $500/inch. Also as someone else posted, the single polyp items like scolys are wild caught. Also a lot of the Australian stuff is going to be wild caught. There are still chop shops out there, even on this board. Now how much wild caught vs aquacultured/maricultured there is I have no idea.

I do know we are no where near being able to sustain the hobby at its current level with home grown corals. I don't know of any facility that would be able to ship out thousands of frags each week to shops. Just think, one big hurricane could shut WWC down for weeks or months.

That is a good point. It is so hard to get any kind of numbers from any of the aquarium hobby suppliers! You do make a good point it seems that the suppliers facilities in the US would have trouble supplying all of the hobbyists. I believe I have heard from some people that many companies also have external facilities or ties to mariculture/aquaculture facilities in other countries.

It appears this problem is a harder one to answer than I had originally anticipated. We don't even have a good way to get an estimate for how much coral is sold/traded yearly let alone where it all comes from. There haven't even been any attempts to quantify the size of the hobby since 2003 when it was done by UNEP in the report "From Oceans to Aquariums".

 

[Opus]

That is a good point. It is so hard to get any kind of numbers from any of the aquarium hobby suppliers! You do make a good point it seems that the suppliers facilities in the US would have trouble supplying all of the hobbyists. I believe I have heard from some people that many companies also have external facilities or ties to mariculture/aquaculture facilities in other countries.

It appears this problem is a harder one to answer than I had originally anticipated. We don't even have a good way to get an estimate for how much coral is sold/traded yearly let alone where it all comes from. There haven't even been any attempts to quantify the size of the hobby since 2003 when it was done by UNEP in the report "From Oceans to Aquariums".

I think it is funny when you mention ties to facilities in other countries. It seems a lot of these places claim to have "their guy" that can get them things that no one else can get. We actually had a local store owner go to the airport and pretend to be the owner of another store so he could find out where he was getting his coral from.

 

[sfin52]

What do you mean by rfa? I am not familiar with that acronym?

Rock flower anemone

 

[ReefHomieJon]

Never bought a coral that I knew was wild caught, only aqua and mari cultured BUT I did recently come back from the US Virgin Islands(St. Thomas) and when I got home there was a decent size “frag” of branching finger coral in my suitcase. Don’t know how it got there but I didn’t want it to die obviously so it’s currently chillin in my Californian Reef

 

[SAWFISH]

I think it is funny when you mention ties to facilities in other countries. It seems a lot of these places claim to have "their guy" that can get them things that no one else can get. We actually had a local store owner go to the airport and pretend to be the owner of another store so he could find out where he was getting his coral from.

That sounds crazy, I guess the hobby can probably get a bit cut-throat at times with how much money these vendors can make off of a single shipment of corals.