11/30/2020
Having been back in marine livestock for a full year now, I have learned how most current hobbyist feel about "live rock". With most now using dead, calcified rock or man made. Most are concerned with introducing unwanted critters and they worry about environmental issues. As an old school importer, I owned one of the largest companies in Florida that collected live rock for the trade in the early 80's. We shipped containers of live rock all around the world and US, everyone wanted it and filled their reef tanks with it.
Since many current hobbyists were not back then, most don't know that almost NONE of the rock we collected was done so from the "reef". That's not where live rock is found! Whether it's Samoa,where I also worked for a couple of summers, or Tonga,where I worked trying to setup a new operation there,( it didn't happen ) or Florida, most of the rock is found near the shore and rubble zones, NOT the reef. Why? It would be too hard to collect in deep water, and there is just not that much on the reef that's easy to collect.
In Tonga, beautiful live rock was found in knee deep water along the shore, a hundred yards from the first reef drop. Also found there were tons of mushroom rocks of every kind along with sand stars and other inverts. In Samoa, beautiful mushrooms, gonipora and other corals were many times found in almost zero visibility water near the shores, along with sharks! I hated going there for the day.
My point? We have a very small amount of "live rock" coming from Fiji this week. It started as the man made rock Walt Smith makes there, then dropped into the ocean to cure. Most has been there 2-5 years and after this load, that's it! I don't think the Fiji government is going to sanction that again. In the old days I would have brought in a ton of it. Now just a few hundred pounds will come. We will post some pics of it later in the week. It will probably be about 8-9Lb.
