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thank you for checking out the vid! the coral and coralline that everyone can grow does the amazing part, the shape of the container is just not usually associated with a reef so if it gets purple it automatically stands out lol
most of the corals you see on everyone's board are no where near full adult wild size, we are all exploiting their juvenile stages in one way or another but I do use aquacultured corals except for that lobo...and I only buy really small fragments of them to maximize the time they can go untrimmed. a lot of stony corals can be bought from a lfs, and instantly trimmed down to 20% of their original space, this all helps make room in any size reef. An example of this would be buying a stand of caulastrea, and then using a saw to cut off every single head from the base and plant those heads as separate polyps...the original skeleton takes up waay too much space. that's why all that candy coral looks the way it does in my palmtop. plus these are relatively easy corals to keep. to do nonphotosynthetics is what no one has tackled yet.
Corals in great water conditions can have lifespans in the thousands of years, and what we think of as an old reef would be a ten year old one so that sets the scale on how much more growth there really is to get out of all corals, our science has just progressed to the point we give backpats for a decade so I like to think all the little frags I cut out and sell/trade end up living nice boring captive lives elsewhere. a lot of my corals are traded like the lobo will be, and a large orange ehinata was, before they get big enough to do harm.
This bowl is stocked with a lot of planning in mind, to throw this stuff together would be a terribly expensive and rather unethical wreck! To run it is not expensive, but these pics also didn't show the hard times when earlier models didn't look so good back around 2001 or so, these are just endpoint pics when the hobby reached a max for me. what else would i post up heh
I have sold most of them or took some down to put into larger (1 gal lol) tanks, but I made it a point to never take down any pico in less time than a year and all this is documented on various web threads over the last 10 years. for this little run I just cherry picked all the good pics and reran em
thank you for checking out the vid! the coral and coralline that everyone can grow does the amazing part, the shape of the container is just not usually associated with a reef so if it gets purple it automatically stands out lol
most of the corals you see on everyone's board are no where near full adult wild size, we are all exploiting their juvenile stages in one way or another but I do use aquacultured corals except for that lobo...and I only buy really small fragments of them to maximize the time they can go untrimmed. a lot of stony corals can be bought from a lfs, and instantly trimmed down to 20% of their original space, this all helps make room in any size reef. An example of this would be buying a stand of caulastrea, and then using a saw to cut off every single head from the base and plant those heads as separate polyps...the original skeleton takes up waay too much space. that's why all that candy coral looks the way it does in my palmtop. plus these are relatively easy corals to keep. to do nonphotosynthetics is what no one has tackled yet.
Corals in great water conditions can have lifespans in the thousands of years, and what we think of as an old reef would be a ten year old one so that sets the scale on how much more growth there really is to get out of all corals, our science has just progressed to the point we give backpats for a decade so I like to think all the little frags I cut out and sell/trade end up living nice boring captive lives elsewhere. a lot of my corals are traded like the lobo will be, and a large orange ehinata was, before they get big enough to do harm.
This bowl is stocked with a lot of planning in mind, to throw this stuff together would be a terribly expensive and rather unethical wreck! To run it is not expensive, but these pics also didn't show the hard times when earlier models didn't look so good back around 2001 or so, these are just endpoint pics when the hobby reached a max for me. what else would i post up heh
I have sold most of them or took some down to put into larger (1 gal lol) tanks, but I made it a point to never take down any pico in less time than a year and all this is documented on various web threads over the last 10 years. for this little run I just cherry picked all the good pics and reran em
