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Unread 03/18/2012, 12:33 PM   #86
ivans75
Registered Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Jakarta, Indonesia
Posts: 340
okay let me tell you a story before your corals even arrived at your LFS and their wholesalers.

I work as a freelancer and consultant in a coral exporter company. I am working and designing their holding system and treatment tank. I also own an LFS as a side business. I got my corals from exporters and direct from collectors in many parts of Indonesia.

The cruelty have started from the collection point. These corals were collected and placed in a 7" deep pool with minimal filtration. Ammonia/nitrate on these pools can go more than 100 ppm in value. Bad looking corals i.e slightly bleached are thrown away instantly in the bin. And in 2 days time, these corals will then be shipped to "holders". These holders hold permits to transport corals to exporters. Here, the corals are treated better, better pools, better filtration, but still minimum. And sometime in less than 24 hours, these corals are already sold to the exporters. Hundreds or even thousand of them to some 20 exporters in Indonesia.

Then in these exporters facility, the corals are well...treated much better. (mostly big companies, they have the money to run the system) Pools with skimmer, some with chillers. Some exporters do care and invest in equipment. But some dont even care. I've seen mountain of dead coral pieces piling up with strong pungent odor in one of coral exporter.

Then these corals are sorted and packed quickly sometimes with no water. Anemones, elegance corals and few LPS are not packed with water or very small amount of water to lessen the cost of air freight. The exporter that I work with, usually ship around 500 kg of corals or around 20 sytrofoam boxes of corals for each shipment. And you know what? Usually 10 percent of the shipment is rejected. If its 500 kg of shipment, then 50 kg of coral pieces/frags are rejected and no matter dead or alive, they go the rubish bin.

Fish is even worst.
Lets take a look at one of our favourite fish to export. Blue damsel. Yes. These fish are selling like popcorn in movie theatre. Hundreds of these fish are kept in a 75 cm sytrofoam box with only aerator for their live supports. There are dead fish and no one seems to care to collect. When they are bagged, they just replace the water with one go without aclimating them. Some will arrive dead in your country and some will arrive half dead. Those are dead and half dead will be thrown away and claim as DOA.

Cruel sad but thats the business. I wish I can do something about it.
I am happy tho that the exporter that I am currently working with do care about this and we are designing a new system in our own holding facility to care about these animals in a more humane manner so we can show it to our client that we are treating our livestock with utmost respect and concern. But guess we can only do it on our own but have no power to prevent these cruelties as a whole.


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Live coral supplier and seller in Jakarta.
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