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Hey everyone,
Many of you are jumping on our high-quality maricultured Acropora specimens, and for good reason! They are healthy, attractive, and responsible ways to add some cool specimens to your collections.
With our latest updates, you'll notice some changes in the way we are presenting them, which will ensure you even greater success and health!
Maricultured frags are awesome. They are grown in the ocean on aggregate rock plugs, and then selected at the source, and shipped to us. Over the course of the year, we have made some observations about their success rate and feel that we've learned a few things that can help everyone. We carefully inspect, dip, and acclimate each maricultured specimen on arrival, and then before shipping to you. However, we've been concerned about two potential issues with specimens on the maricultured plugs.
First, we feel that the plugs could be a haven for pests and hitchhikers that we may not want in our reefs, and despite our extensive quarantine and dipping protocol, the potential for an unwanted introduction still exists, due to the nature of the plugs. We hate risk, especially with living organisms and customers' hard-earned cash.
Second, many of you expressed concerns about the difficulty of placing them into your aquascape on the plugs. Those rounded little "boulders" don't always fit into your aquascape so easily, huh? We get it.
Good, but we think there is a better way!
A third issue that we have is the potential for die-off of the macro and micro life forms on these plugs during shipping, which could potentially foul the water in the bag and overly stress the corals during transit.
You will notice that we no longer offer these maricultured specimens on the rock plugs. We now follow the same rigorous inspection, dip and quarantine practice that we always have, with the additional step of sawing the bases off of the corals and gluing them to a clean frag disk of appropriate size. If you don't care for the disk in your reef, you can easily but carefully remove the specimens from the disks without any stress to the coral, and glue them right on to your reef structure for a more natural look.
Just as before, we keep these corals in our systems until they have recovered from the rigors of transhipping, preparation, and acclimation before they ever hit our website. Keep in mind that some actively-growing colonies handled in this matter will often not show significant encrusting for months, so when you receive your specimen, it may give you the (incorrect) impression that it was a freshly-chopped-up wild colony glued to a plug and called "maricultured", as some unscrupulous vendors have done in years past. This is most assuredly NOT the case. Like everything else we do at Unique Corals, we instituted this procedure because we feel that it is in the best interest of our customers and our corals.
This process delays getting these corals to you, costs us money in terms of time and labor,and materials, and doesn't earn us instant payback on our investment.Frankly, to a coral vendor, it's a downright PITA!
Oh well.
Guess what? It's the right thing to do.
Frankly, it's tedious, time-consuming, and a bit harder on the corals initially. However, the corals that are being shipped on these plugs are way healthier, more colorful, and seem to recover more quickly from shipping. You'll notice the difference!
The one thing you WON'T notice is an increase in price. We kind of figure that a quality product needs to be offerred in a quality format, and we are already offering a a high-quality product. We're just making it better.
We don't have to do things like this, but we figured that you'd want to know about it.
Thanks as always for your support! Look for a big Acro update with our first release of "replugged" maricultured Acropora specimens tomorrow!
Regards,
Scott Fellman and Joseph Caparatta
Unique Corals
Many of you are jumping on our high-quality maricultured Acropora specimens, and for good reason! They are healthy, attractive, and responsible ways to add some cool specimens to your collections.
With our latest updates, you'll notice some changes in the way we are presenting them, which will ensure you even greater success and health!
Maricultured frags are awesome. They are grown in the ocean on aggregate rock plugs, and then selected at the source, and shipped to us. Over the course of the year, we have made some observations about their success rate and feel that we've learned a few things that can help everyone. We carefully inspect, dip, and acclimate each maricultured specimen on arrival, and then before shipping to you. However, we've been concerned about two potential issues with specimens on the maricultured plugs.
First, we feel that the plugs could be a haven for pests and hitchhikers that we may not want in our reefs, and despite our extensive quarantine and dipping protocol, the potential for an unwanted introduction still exists, due to the nature of the plugs. We hate risk, especially with living organisms and customers' hard-earned cash.
Second, many of you expressed concerns about the difficulty of placing them into your aquascape on the plugs. Those rounded little "boulders" don't always fit into your aquascape so easily, huh? We get it.
Good, but we think there is a better way!
A third issue that we have is the potential for die-off of the macro and micro life forms on these plugs during shipping, which could potentially foul the water in the bag and overly stress the corals during transit.
You will notice that we no longer offer these maricultured specimens on the rock plugs. We now follow the same rigorous inspection, dip and quarantine practice that we always have, with the additional step of sawing the bases off of the corals and gluing them to a clean frag disk of appropriate size. If you don't care for the disk in your reef, you can easily but carefully remove the specimens from the disks without any stress to the coral, and glue them right on to your reef structure for a more natural look.
Just as before, we keep these corals in our systems until they have recovered from the rigors of transhipping, preparation, and acclimation before they ever hit our website. Keep in mind that some actively-growing colonies handled in this matter will often not show significant encrusting for months, so when you receive your specimen, it may give you the (incorrect) impression that it was a freshly-chopped-up wild colony glued to a plug and called "maricultured", as some unscrupulous vendors have done in years past. This is most assuredly NOT the case. Like everything else we do at Unique Corals, we instituted this procedure because we feel that it is in the best interest of our customers and our corals.
This process delays getting these corals to you, costs us money in terms of time and labor,and materials, and doesn't earn us instant payback on our investment.Frankly, to a coral vendor, it's a downright PITA!
Oh well.
Guess what? It's the right thing to do.
Frankly, it's tedious, time-consuming, and a bit harder on the corals initially. However, the corals that are being shipped on these plugs are way healthier, more colorful, and seem to recover more quickly from shipping. You'll notice the difference!
The one thing you WON'T notice is an increase in price. We kind of figure that a quality product needs to be offerred in a quality format, and we are already offering a a high-quality product. We're just making it better.
We don't have to do things like this, but we figured that you'd want to know about it.
Thanks as always for your support! Look for a big Acro update with our first release of "replugged" maricultured Acropora specimens tomorrow!
Regards,
Scott Fellman and Joseph Caparatta
Unique Corals
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