Coral Bank

Reef Goddess · Nov 28, 2007

Hi all, happy hump day!

A came up with an idea quite awhile ago but haven't had any luck getting people local to me interested. Since so many of us are growers on this forum I thought I might give it another go.

I've been thinking for a long time that it would be really good to start a coral bank. The reason I think we need this is because many of us keep rare/beautiful sps, palys, leathers, lps, etc.

Some of these corals have taken us a long time to find and are worth a lot to us. We all have lost corals either from parasites, hurricanes, power outages, tank crashes, etc. I'm sure all of you have lost corals that have taken a long time to replace or maybe you can't find again. I know that before one of the hurricanes I had a great hokesemai that was much nicer/faster growing than any of the maricultured ones I see nowadays.

What if we all started a coral bank that had a list of each important coral that we keep that we would like to trade frags of, so in case anything were to happen in the future we would have a few different people with the same coral that we could rely on for a backup frag.
Its a good excuse to trade and I think it would give a lot of us peace of mind when trying to preserve our mother-colonies. It would also save us all a lot of time and money that is wasted trying to find the same coral again.

So what do you guys think?

Weetabix7 · Nov 28, 2007

I think it's a cool idea.
Not sure how the logistics would work out.

turbois300 · Nov 28, 2007

I too tihnk that is a great idea. I don't have much that is super rare but definately some stuff I'd like to make sure stays around or could be replaced. If I can help or contribute then I'm in. I would imagine that the holding facility would need to have certain qualifications like back up generators and overall quality and lighting specifics... I'm like Weetabix7...not sure how the best way to do it but I'm all for it. It could also serve as a depository and central growing station for all those lineage crazy peeps. As they grew to large colonies they could be fragged and have a definate origin.

Weetabix7 · Nov 28, 2007

I thought Reef Goddess was talking about something more along the lines of a group of us getting together and trading our "good stuff" with each other with the understanding that if one of us had a tank crash or lost what we had, the person we had traded a frag with would then send us a frag back so that we wouldn't permanently lose the piece.
Don't know if I said that well, but does this make sense?

I'm not sure how we would figure out the ground rules for this so that all who agree to participate are safeguarded, but I'll put some thought into it.
Truthfully, I'm just now starting to get into the higher end stuff, so I probably only have a few things that others would be interested in.
Here's a few pics:

(back left piece)

Some of these aren't necessarily rare, I just think they're cool.

turbois300 · Nov 28, 2007

Oh....I've been looking into this monitor too long today!!! I hear ya. Well that would make it way easier!!! One of the local guys has been doing that with me i think...he gives me 1 or 2 polyps of super nice stuff and I try to grow it out also to make sure that if he needs more there is someone right down the road he can go to for backup! Definately a great idea.

Hypertek99 · Nov 28, 2007

I would be interested in this also now that i have 2 tanks i'm going to frag some stuff over to my frag tank. Looking into a backup generator as i had a power outage like a few weeks ago. It only lasted like 30mins which wasn't too bad.

turbois300 · Nov 28, 2007

Well if you would take some of my stuff then I'd have a backup too!!! ha ha h ha ha ha. Seriously we should do more of this! Kinda like the grape slurpe that you traded and the dude lost or whatever happened. You could have come to me and gotten more!!! mmmuuuuuwaaahhhhh

Hypertek99 · Nov 28, 2007

The Purple Haze Micro is fine. The piece i fragged didn't make it though. But it's growing pretty fast so i'll be fragging again in a couple of months. All my micros are doing good again. I made it through the battle. The only one that got hit the most is my Pink Lemonade Micro. Figures the most expensive one too. Still have 3 polyps left been treating it like a king hopefully it will start growing again.

Reef Goddess · Nov 28, 2007

Yes, that is what I had in mind. Mind you if some millionaire wants to step up and give us a facility with growout tanks and a big generator, I'm totally open to that too. ;p

I think having pest free, well established tanks should be sort of a pre req. I don't know if we should have guidlines for how long a tank has to be established, etc but these are things we can think about. I would be happy having 3 different people that have one of my corals as a backup. I also imagine that certain people would only want to keep certain corals. Like I would be interested in growing backup sps, lps, and leather colonies for other people right now.

I think it would be good for trading because we'd all would be sharing some primo frags with each other out and getting the enjoyment of growing said coral as well as helping each other out. Some corals are just so expensive to replace if your mother colony goes down. In the past, it would have been really nice if I'd known when I lost something that there was someone I could contact to get another frag of it.

I used to have a huge green palua nephthea. When I moved it got too stressed out and just melted in like one day, I wasn't able to save any of it. Luckily one of my customers had just given me some from on of his colonies that he originally purchased from me. Otherwise I would have had to hunt it down and probably pay someone else for it.
There's so many of us now that are successful growers and I think we could really benefit from a cooperative. ;] Lets start a commune.... LOL

turbois300 · Nov 29, 2007

I agree. After I move I'll have a pretty massive setup for growing and displaying, so I'm definately in. By the time we get this all figured out I'll have mad room and ohpefully some "rare" stuff that you all will want/need to add to your gardens!!