Grafting: Make your own rainbow chalice? Acro? Pics are Proof.

[franklypre]

It's supply and demand with a lot of it, I know somebody is gonna pay whatever just to one up or keep up. I will be closely monitoring this to see what it does, if this method results in two chalices growing side by side or one growing over the top of the other I will adjust my theory. I've seen Unique Corals release a few chalices lately that have successfully grafted/fused though I didn't notice any rainbow or mixing of color. Obviously there are people that could easily answer my original question but until they speak up I'll continue to update with my progress.

 

[Wildexpressions]

Ocean aquaculturing is primarily Acro's and Monti's and it has done amazing things but it is generally not the source of rarer high end corals.

listen, there is some minor truth to most of the points being made but none of those reason is the answer. The issue that has not been addresses unless I missed it is that coral change colors. Rainbow Chalices don't look like Rainbow Chalices in the wild. Plain dark greenish muddy looking crap is how the vast majority of deep water chalices look in the wild. Once harvested the pieces move though the system pretty fast. They do not remain with any particular aspect of the supply chain long enough to color up and reveal themselves. It is a game of hot potato as everyone wants their return on investment ASAP and no one wants it to die in their possession and they do die and staggering numbers when you look at the industry as a whole. When I get it it there might be some hints of whats to come but often not so much.

We are small little hole in the wall shop with limited space and resources and yet we have literally 10's of $1000's tied up in a perishable items. It often takes several months of stability in a quality holding system before the coral acclimates and starts responding and then we move it into a color up system. There is no one type of color up system that will do the job for all corals, not even close. Heck something as simple as paly's vary so much that not one or even two or even three different systems(lights,water,chemistry) is enough to optimize the range of plays in my tanks.

Quality coral shops put in a lot of time and effort acquiring the skills , the experience and the knowledge and even then they are largely gambling when they invest their time and money into growing it out in the hopes they got it right. I've bought corals from very experienced reef keepers that languished in their aquariums for years and six months later I was asking 4 times what I paid for the entire colony for a small frag because it blossomed into something stunning in one of my systems . I've also given up on many pieces and sold them off to make room for other corals only to find out later I had made a big mistake. That I simply had not placed it in the right grow system to bring out that specific morphs hidden beauty.

When I get it right I deserve to make decent money from it. Wholesalers and supplier are increasingly squeezing us for more money if a coral exhibits any potential at all and many of those pieces do not pan out into anything special. I hope to break even on those or squeeze out a modest profit. If that was all there was there would be no coral industry because there would be no significant profit.

Corals should not be cheap in my opinion. The reefs have been devastated in many place by this hobby. Corals should not treated like the disposable easily replaceable commodity so many seem to think they are. In every hobby there is always a cream of the crop, the ultimate, the barely attainable and it is always expensive because market demand ultimately sets the price. If a dealer can get $3000 and eye on the open market than it is worth $3000 an eye. When he can no longer get that price he will ask less.

 

[Wildexpressions]

I can't edit my long winded mildly off topic post. I got wrapped on responding to the tone of the messages I forgot the point of the thread. Sorry about that.

 

[franklypre]

I appreciate the response but IMO coral shouldn't cost an arm and a leg unless it has been aquacultured, wild coral is abundant and fast growing in most cases. This industry hasn't done a % of the damage as the Oil companies, shipping companies, or general runoff of pollution. Ocean acidification and sedimentation is the "known" cause for coral mortality in most cases. By making coral affordable it would give this hobby the ability to keep coral alive long after the oceans are incapable through aquaculture, however this was not the intended scope of my thread. I have seen what reefs look like and if all you are getting is the brown poo poo corals you are ordering from the wrong place, check out what Jason Fox just brought back from Indo. While it may take time to make a particular coral beautiful charging 3000 for an eye of a coral that cost 30 bucks or a single paly that costs 100 when you have 100 to sell that were recently collected is price gauging IMO. Example: I recently paid 125 bucks for a NICE japanese shantung maple, it has lineage that dates back over a century. I'm sure they could sell it for thousands if they wanted but the reality is there are few industries where supply and demand are manipulated to the extremes like the coral industry is. Fish are hard to catch and require patience and persistence but the cost hasn't gone crazy because people know better, even with the outlawing of poisoning to catch them. Coral is easy to collect, especially when it is being farmed specifically for our hobby. My hope is that somebody who works or has visited these mariculture sites and knows enough about our hobby has fragged several color morphs of chalice together and created these beautiful creatures we call rainbow chalices. However if they are 1 in a million pieces that took years to locate and years to color up my question would be simply why is it that there haven't been many found until the last few years. Either way the industry will do what it does and my thread will not change it, I just want to know how it happens and I believe we all deserve to know.

 

[Smnparish]

The issue that has not been addresses unless I missed it is that coral change colors. Rainbow Chalices don't look like Rainbow Chalices in the wild. Plain dark greenish muddy looking crap is how the vast majority of deep water chalices look in the wild.

I have to disagree, have you seen what Jason Fox has recently brought back from indo? That was like a month ago, and I think he knew what he was getting from the ocean at the time.

 

[KLR]

Over my few years in the hobby, I have always basically believed that the majority of coral we see are not truly, in natural quantity occurrence, rare. Rare being defined as not occurring often. This becomes more and more so apparent with every recent fad in the collector side of the hobby. The Red Dragon acropora use to cost hundreds of dollars per frag because it was so rare and now maricultured colonies of the same, though claimed to be different, acroporas are being brought into the U.S. by the box load. Similarly, the colored eye alien eye chalices have occurred in the same way. Starting with Jason's infamous hitchhiker, My Miami, the hobby thought orange eyes, with a blue body, and a green rim was a once in a life time deal. That reflected the initial price. However, within the last year there have been new orange eye, blue body, green rim chalices released almost every month or two. This realization can seriously be applied to almost every fad, almost. I am pretty sure that most of the corals that are truly rare to nature are not going to show up in the U.S. in mass quantities similar to the fads we have seen because they are more than likely legally protected, very difficult to harvest, both, or something else that makes them hard to incorporate into the trade. My last note on this part of my huge scattered thought is, we have to consider how much of the ocean is undiscovered and how much of the ocean we, as the hobby, claim to know in addition to how we put these percentages into relation with the quantity of specific corals that are "scarcely" available in the U.S. via wholesale and retail.

While it may seem that I am trash talking this, I actually am not. I have no issue with this and I think these trends make collecting worthwhile. If no coral was perceived to be incredibly limited, there would really be no collecting to this hobby. I also enjoy these trends because they allow me to try to apply my foresight to the new coral trends, "Do I think this coral will burn out soon or will it be a craze for years?". I think these components, plus some others, make collectors very passionate about their tanks. I completely support the prices given to most of these corals because I understand the efforts made to get them in addition to the requirements of a business, not everything is profit. If a coral is selling fast for x amount of dollars, power to the sellers and the buyers for pleasant transactions! Lastly, just by looking at my tanks you can tell that I support this part of the hobby. 90% of my corals come with a catchy name, hahaha.


^This is my opinion and only that.^

 

[KLR]

Now onto the subject concerned in the original post.

You can force graft most corals. It is just not remotely easy. I have personally successfully grafted two montiporas together, however I lost my grafted result out:, via a method I learned from an ex-sps addict who successfully grafted SPS this way. SPS seem to be the easiest to graft. I am not 100% sure why, but I would assume it is has something to do with them having a thin amount tissue on their skeleton, a great amount of polyps per colony, the fact that they consume mass amounts of particulate matter, a mixture of those, or something similar. Those characteristics seem to supply the most reason for more easily transmitted pigments in my opinion. Both natural and force grafts of SPS have been and are continuing to be seen in the hobby.

On to LPS! Grafted LPS they do exists. WWC sold an amazing grafted australomussa a few months ago and Cornbred has a grafted chalice that consists of Bubble Gum Monster and Miami Hurricane in his collection. I do not know much about force grafting LPS, so I will not include potentially false information in the post to save you all a headache or two. Opinion--> I personally believe grafted LPS occur more often than the hobby thinks, but we do not want to accept it because then grafted LPS would not be as fun. I developed that belief from seeing the Widowmaker chalice, its hundreds of look alikes, all of these rainbow chalices recently, in addition to bi-color single polyped LPS, and a few others. <--Opinion

Now the softies! I think soft corals graft the easiest out of all of our common corals but I also think they lose their graft the easiest because they can deflate and inflate so easily via transfer of liquid internally to externally and the other way around. A few polyps have been successfully force grafted in the past, for example the two-face protopaly that mixes the Nuclear Green Protopaly with the Purple Death Protopaly. I also think I remember this graft naturally occurring in someones tank via juxtaposition of two colonies, but do not hold me to that statement. To date the only successful force grafts that I know of have required to reefer to split single polyps in half and glue the desired opposite halves together. However, the fatality rate is normally very high and even if the new polyps do survive, they may lose their graft by the end of the process.

The subject of coral grafting greatly interested me for a few weeks a while back and I found a ton of interesting articles, studies, media, etc. Let me see if I can find any of those links again.

 

[KLR]

Here is the australomussa mentioned in my previous post. It is very obvious that grafting has occurred in this coral. Picture by World Wide Corals.

 

[Acro76]

Australomussa do not grow fast enough for any vendor to graft them, with the possible exception of very small frags. There have been a few examples of naturally "grafted" Australomussa in the hobby over the few years it has been popular.

 

[KLR]

I meant to put naturally grafted. I was not trying to say WWC grafted that in their store or anything. I agree with you though on their growth rate probably making it very difficult or near unlikely for forced grafting.

 

[nonstopfish]

I appreciate the response but IMO coral shouldn't cost an arm and a leg unless it has been aquacultured, wild coral is abundant and fast growing in most cases. This industry hasn't done a % of the damage as the Oil companies, shipping companies, or general runoff of pollution. Ocean acidification and sedimentation is the "known" cause for coral mortality in most cases. By making coral affordable it would give this hobby the ability to keep coral alive long after the oceans are incapable through aquaculture, however this was not the intended scope of my thread. I have seen what reefs look like and if all you are getting is the brown poo poo corals you are ordering from the wrong place, check out what Jason Fox just brought back from Indo. While it may take time to make a particular coral beautiful charging 3000 for an eye of a coral that cost 30 bucks or a single paly that costs 100 when you have 100 to sell that were recently collected is price gauging IMO. Example: I recently paid 125 bucks for a NICE japanese shantung maple, it has lineage that dates back over a century. I'm sure they could sell it for thousands if they wanted but the reality is there are few industries where supply and demand are manipulated to the extremes like the coral industry is. Fish are hard to catch and require patience and persistence but the cost hasn't gone crazy because people know better, even with the outlawing of poisoning to catch them. Coral is easy to collect, especially when it is being farmed specifically for our hobby. My hope is that somebody who works or has visited these mariculture sites and knows enough about our hobby has fragged several color morphs of chalice together and created these beautiful creatures we call rainbow chalices. However if they are 1 in a million pieces that took years to locate and years to color up my question would be simply why is it that there haven't been many found until the last few years. Either way the industry will do what it does and my thread will not change it, I just want to know how it happens and I believe we all deserve to know.

Sounds to me you need to spend some time in the ocean...I don't mean it to be rude, but I think it teaches a lot compared to the "ocean" we stare at through glass panes. Coral is not abundant in many places where collection has been strong. Granted, the reasons aren't always solely by the volume collected, but the practices, etc. Assuming corals are just a never ending resource is plainly untrue. Much of Southeast Asia is without coral anymore for a multitude of reasons. The hobby isn't entirely to blame, but it sure hasn't helped. Spending months in Indonesia I can attest to the multitude of places lacking in coral and fish. A region much less regulated and highly exploited compared to more developed areas of the world where coral grows. The fish being particularly interesting, because it wasn't always the fish density as a whole, but fish that are popular in the hobby seemingly gone missing. Having dove and snorkeled extensively on Bali, Lombok, Flores, Sulawesi, Sumatra, Papua in Indonesia as well as others countries, I can tell you that you will find less Hippo Tangs during hours underwater at those locations than walking into most LFS's. I can also tell you most of the places have anything but flourishing reefs, parts of Sulawesi, Flores(Komodo, highly protected park mostly because of the Dragons), and Raja Ampat(the most diverse reefs on the planet for coral, protected and untapped for at least a bit longer, an airport is being built that will likely soon destroy it.) being the exceptions. Everywhere else being a shell of it's former glory.


More on topic..sorry for the tangent. I lean towards the previously undiscovered side. Small pockets can contain things we haven't previously seen, particularly at depth. Places where unique things grow around even one island, found no where else in the world. Finding new corals all the time. The colors of which definitely can change once introduced into captivity. There are definitely some bright pieces in the wild, but so relatively mundane looking corals can develop into beauties.

 

[franklypre]

While coral may not be it's former glory the fact that it's being readily farmed in various locations should offset the minimal damage wild harvesting causes until it can all be completely aquacultured, and sure much like the forests, whales, and all the thousands of creatures it's not as good as it was 20 years ago. When I hear the save the ocean propaganda I immediately think of the zoos that keep endangered animals and replace them into the wild, is that not what we are doing, not saying I personally have any plans to put coral into the ocean yet but if the need were there and the oceans were clean I would. I personally do not buy "wild" coral anymore as maricultured/farmed and aquaculture is much easier to get and is nicer IMO. Anybody have anything on the rainbow chalice origins? I would thoroughly enjoy reading anything on force grafting or any other method of grafting as that is the point of this thread. Don't mean to sound rude but we've gotten a long way from the scope of this thread, there are plenty of places to argue/discuss collection methods and what not. BTW hippo's are now tank bred regularly, hopefully all fish that are popular will soon be, mostly in part to one company.

 

[TheReefShack]

As far as the rainbow chalice is concerned, along with the price tag. For the most part the cost of a frag of a rainbow chalice is what the "market value" is or just what the owner thinks they can get for it. I recently had the chance to purchase 3 very nice ultra rainbow chalices directly from and Indo exporter. Each one had anywhere from 20-30 eyes and the price was over $1,000. This was the cost directly from the island, so lets say I was to buy this wholesale? might be around $2,000 after all the fees box charges and ex. if it has 20 eyes each eye my cost would still be $100. And everyone wants to make a bit of money, so I try and sell it for $250 an eye. All i'm trying to say is that the cost all starts at the origin. Most of the retail store are not trying to intentionally rip people off when they charge that much. Some stores pay an upward of $5,000 for a nice ultra box of corals.

Hope this helps so people know that the cost is high to begin with direct from the supplier.

 

[franklypre]

So they do come from Indo then, awesome to know, agreed some markup is good business, but if you pay a grand for a piece, chop it up into 20 and sell them for a grand a piece that is excessive IMO, 250=400 would be high but fair for a nice piece. I gladly paid 175 for my UC Reiki chalice and feel it was a decent price. It is nice to know they are being collected rather than aquacultured, thank you.

 

[TheReefShack]

Not all are collected tho. A lot of time the people on the island will cut it up them-self and grow it out. Out they put it back In the ocean to grow out. But yes most rainbow chalices come from the info area. 2 islands mainly.