Coral price and coral names

Jimmy Long · Jul 21, 2019

Anyone else think people slap on a name for a coral and then up the price according to how 'fancy' the name is? I've fell victim to this(mainly with Acros) but too me it's kind of crazy how some corals are priced based off their name. I've seen mushrooms that are super basic go for $20-30 a frag when they should be $5-10.

Biokabe · Jul 21, 2019

People can ask for whatever price they want. You can choose whether you want to pay their asking price. That's how buying and selling works.

People name their corals for any number of reasons. Is some of it to drive up the cost? Maybe, but the biggest reason has to do with identifiability. Think about cars: Is it easier to say, "I would like to buy a two-seat sports car with a mid-engine mount, a 3.5-liter V6 engine with 647 horsepower, a carbon fiber body, an aluminum frame..." and so on, or to say, "I would like to buy a 2019 Ford GT?"

Same thing with named corals. Coral farmers name them because it makes it easy for them to quickly identify the color morph and its unique characteristics to anyone who is familiar with them. If someone tells me they have a tank with an OG bounce mushroom, a Homewrecker acro, a colony of Aoi zoas and a firecracker chalice, I can immediately imagine what their tank looks like. Same thing if someone tells me they have a green slimer, a bubblegum digi, some radioactive dragon eyes, some whammin' watermelons, a Miami Hurricane chalice, a red planet acro, a valida tri-color and so on.

When you have names, it's much easier to quickly communicate things that might otherwise be difficult or unwieldy to communicate. For example, look up an Utter Chaos zoanthid and then come back and try and describe it as succinctly as possible. It'll take a lot longer than it would for me to say I have some Utter Chaos zoas in my tank (I don't, but for argument's sake we'll pretend I do).

The other thing is... yes, it does allow vendors to keep the price up, but not for the reason that you're positing. Some people are very passionate (and well-funded) collectors of corals. The names allow them to target the corals that they want to collect. If they were not excited about those corals and willing to pay those prices, then the existence of the name itself would do nothing to keep the price up. The price remains high because the corals are desirable, as evidenced by the people who are willing to pay those prices for them. If those corals were common and easy to reproduce, then no matter how snazzy the name was, the price would come down.

Ultimately, only two things (three, if we include government-mandated prices) can ever bring down the price of items:

1) Reductions in the cost of creating each individual unit that a vendor sells (allowing them to produce more units for the same cost, which lets them lower the price to expand the pool of potential buyers);

2) Slow sales (forcing vendors to drop prices in order to move their products according to their desired timeline; sales might be slow because of an increase in competition or a decrease in demand).