14/07/2025
It’s a massive thankyou to all the customers that have supported myself and Leanne on our adventure in the aquarium industry. 🙌👏Without you nothing we achieved would have been possible. There too many to mention and not leave others out, we had so many donations of great corals proven suitable for captive care. Ian Lannery gave me a pulsating xenia what must have been at least 20 years ago and has been a top seller producing 1000’s of clones from us alone. I am sure it will perpetuate in the hobby forever. David Bloch used to bring his branching hammer coral purchased 30 odd years or more ago to the MASWA meets and give away polyps for free. It was one we were proud to sell knowing it was a coral that proves sustainability is possible for our hobby. Then there are all those customers that have loyally supported us for years and even decades.🙌
The time has come for us to move on. We had a ten-year plan for our purpose built coral farm, now some 16 years have passed 🤣 and it is time to call it quits.
Starting as a wild collect operation in the 1990’s, we soon saw there were issues with wild harvest corals. First hand we saw the impact to the coral reefs on the first world wide bleaching event in 1998. The approval for Australia to export corals took a small fishery to next level with a massive sudden increase in fishing effort. Fisheries managers were slow to see what the changes in the way fishers operated. We saw localized depletions and even extinctions of corals in the areas we fished with different operators competing for the resource.
We were fortunate to be able to learn the craft to cost effectively produce cultured corals in conjunction with our wild collect operation. Proud to now say we have operated completely independent of wild collections for 15 years, with no inputs from coral reefs. Most our corals are 15-20 years from first being removed from a wild reef, all are well over 10 and some 30 or more. All this has been done with no grants, or no funding. It was able to stand on it’s own feet as a viable small family business. We were the first in Australia to sell corals direct to the consumer via the internet. How things have changed!
In the beginning, it was a lot of work as we were producing many clown fish growing out clams from spat and on selling products from some like minded partners, like the awesome seahorses and shrimps from Seahorse Sanctuary. Recent years the farms been largely automated, soley producing corals. Just packing out one day per week and spending a day or two to do some maintenance and make new cuttings. For those that don’t know, in recent years I have been doing fishing tours out of Lancelin the remainder of the week www.tailoredtreks.com.au
With new loud calls to phase out the wild collection of corals, it’s a great time to start a coral farm. I hope we have inspired a new generation of like minded hobbyists. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask in the comments. There is a lot of little tricks we have learnt over the years. To be honest it is not hard to grow corals. The real trick is to stop growing unwanted pests, algae’s etc. and to do it in a cost effective way.
