Coral exports indonesia
 

Any updates on coral exports from Indonesia? Seems like its a permanent ban.

I feel like you can try to look for an alternative seller nearby, why does it need to be from Indonesia?

I would think by now alternatives would have filled the void.
But all that comes in on corals is from Australia (highly regulated and expensive) and Tonga.
So I would think there are not many other sources that allow the collection and export of corals these days.
On the other hand, fish, inverts, and anemones are still coming in from many places:
Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Djibouti, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines, Marshal Islands, Solomon Islands, Fiji,...

Look for an alternative seller nearby? 80+% of the hobbies corals were collected in Indonesia lol...

Australia is really the only option which is why $10/head euphyllia is are now $50-60+/head euphyllia.

We brought in only documented cultured coral from Indo and fragged it further. That was our customers requirement, nothing wild imported and then chopped up. It was all soft coral and obvious it was grown on concrete plugs, not cut, glued and shipped. That supply has not been replaced by other sources.
The ban costs us about 20k/month in gross.

An LFS told me that it is quite common that Indonesian "coral farms" would harvest frags from wild corals, glue them to concrete plugs, "culture" them just long enough to encrust, and then ship them.
And honestly, that's pretty much the only way to offer "farmed" corals at the prices they charge.
Or do you seriously think they have so many mother colonies that they can cut thousands of frags from them to satisfy the worldwide demand?
So, in the end, the only difference is really where the chopping happens...

Sorry, but if you see the farms in Indonesia you would not make this statement. They literally have tens of thousands of mini-colonies, just about twice to three times the size of an average Indo frag. Those get split regularly, a few go into sale, the others into growout. That is actually cheaper and less labor intensive than clipping small pieces from large wild colonies. Even with labor as cheap as in Indonesia, it all boils down to the question how can you mass produce frags with the least amount of work.

Interesting. Some local collectors (not all) are doing the same thing. Don’t think they’re marketing them as aquacultured per se but when you see an acro frag on a plug it’s easy to make that assumption I guess.

Their reasoning:

I'm not disputing that, but I have never seen such small imported frags in the trade here. Whatever reaches the stores here are reasonably large (between golf to tennis ball sized) "maricultured" corals ("grown out" in the ocean as evident by the quite frequent hitchhiker and symbiotic crabs) which the local stores then often cut down to small frags.
The small frags in the trade here come exclusively from local reefers, US coral farms like ORA, or are fragged from maricultured or wild collected corals by the local stores.

I would think the parrot fish swarms on the Australian reefs eat more coral tips in a day than all collectors of Australia could collect in a year. And it has been shown that cutting tips of healthy corals stimulates their growth. So I think there is nothing on the environmental or ethical side that speaks against this form of frag collection.
It also adds more diversity to the coral gene pool in captivity.

Absolutely. Our fishery is strictly monitored. I think Charles veron said some years ago that our coral collection had the same impact as a bicycle ridden on roads around the whole country.

Much more damage is done by cyclones than collectors gathering stock.

I've seen corals come in as aquacultured/maricultured larger than a softball.
That could still be true but when you open the bags and the smell is overwhelmingly fresh 2-part epoxy and not acro it's obvious what was happening.

It won’t be open for a long time. Basically the whole process of CITES is being reviewed and redone because putting an acanthophyllia on a concrete disc does not qualify for mariculture. This is the stuff that needed to stop. I worked wholesale for 6 years and some of the stuff that passed through the CITES was ridiculous. I could pop off wellsos from their disc with no problem.. I’ve seen the disc separated from the coral in the bag lol. There is not enough documentation and information to properly conclude if Mariculturing is sustainable. In order to prove it to the Indo government that is.

Alex,
I saw acro colonies bigger than a softball come in on fresh concrete.
You could smell the 2-part epoxy used to attach them over the normal smell of the coral. lol

https://indonesiaexpat.biz/featured/...nesian-corals/


https://oceangardener.org/

Nice find

Some will start saying "don't hurt those corals... they have feelings".

This might work.
Link using Google Translate

https://translate.google.com/transla...it-karang-hias