Like many members here who have been present when shipments came in over the last 20 years we all know that 10 to 15% of the acropora is like WOW! That might literally be 3 to 6 examples. The owner knows he can mark those way up compared to the others. He knows he can reserve some of those to frag or grow out to frag. The rest quite frankly is average to blah.
It is the way it has always been. The most desirable stuff we have today is that small percentage of amazing coral that come in via 100s of shipments.
Pick something even easier to figure out. Like monti cap. No ones cares about the usual colors. But if that one special cap comes in... hot dang... we have a winner. And a new craze starts. Ditto with digitata. A super cheap coral. But what if a new color came in like pink with yellow? Boom. 150 dollar frags and everyone must have it.
Acropora is exactly the same. I guess one gets jaded over time. The owner knows special when they see it quite often.
If everything was awesome... we would not even have pricing discussions here. Everything would be amazing. Well it ain't
I get what your saying, I have been in the hobby for almost that long. But that statement threw me off since indo has the most variety of acropora we can get basically anywhere. And lots of the nicer new stuff out now was what people have left from when indo was opened. Sure mariculture is mostly the same stuff for months at a time coming in and it sounds like this will be the case for even longer or forever unless they get wild collection going again. You really think out of that whole farm there is only a handful of really nice acropora in it? I guess everyone’s views on what really nice is varies but for the people who like to collect acros just for their color I guess they could say indo mariculture is boring but the guys like me who collect certain species for growth as well, we will be more excited to see this area open.
I wonder if we will see more pieces come in with nice green pigment infections from indo since all their racks have corals growing and weaving into each other. This is another thing I will have my eye on.
Fun part is we can actually debate and guess what things will be like soon! Imagine what things would be like if no sites opened ever again.