the Future of our Industry?

This video is something that we are extremely passionate about and have been working on for many months. After intense waiting, tons of driving, and extensive editing, here it is!

Little background story to start this off. One day, Keri O’Neil and I were hanging out with Shane Lafreniere at his house and had some serious discussions on the future of the hobby. The what ifs and ramifications of potential bans that were to happen in our industry – the last Indo ban that we had few years back, as well as bans that are active in Europe scared us for our industry and all the vendors and manufacturers in it.

We then had this crazy idea of spawning corals to relieve some of our dependency on the wild-collected corals and this was only mentioned because Keri was and is world’s leading expert in coral spawning. With 17 species of coral spawning under her belt, everything rolled very quickly after Keri agreed to take on this project.

We were instantly hit with roadblocks because as with many corals in our hobby, this coral had no scientific paper on how it reproduces and we were just given blank data to fill our usual checklist. We knew nothing. We didn’t know if they were spawners, if they “dropped” babies along with so many other details and the information that we needed to make this happen and it was incredibly frustrating to find that nothing was available.

We went to extreme measures to learn in name of science and came across much information to get this done for the first time.

This video here is our journey documented from the very beginning to now.

I want to give huge thanks to Keri for taking on this ambitious project, dealing with me, Shane, and Chris constantly asking you what’s going on, what to do, what to expect, and guiding us with her knowledge and with patience. I also want to thank Shane for spending so many hours driving back and forth, providing all the equipment, installing it, and procuring all the additional broodstock for this project, and to Chris Meckley and Amanda Meckley of ACI Aquaculture for always believing in my work and jumping into this with both feet without any hesitation. All the broodstock they have donated to this project will benefit so many down the road and I am so excited that they, with help of Keri, created their own spawning room to go on the journey with us and not just watch from the sidelines.

I truly, sincerely believe that this is something that our hobby needs more of and also believe that this is just the beginning. I can’t wait to see how many more species we get going, and inspire and motivate many talented “coral breeders” to get in on the action.

This video is heavily edited because we didn’t think that many folks wanted to see our ramblings from 3am but if you guys want, I will post a link here so that you can take a look at it.

Thank you for watching the video and let me know in the comment section down below what you think and what coral spawning project we should spearhead next.