Adam is joined by Dr. Samuel Nietzer and Dr. Mareen Möller: coral reproduction experts. Sam and Mareen met in 2008 during their undergraduate studies at the University of Würzburg. Their research collaboration began in 2010 with trips to Guam, USA, focusing on coral reproduction. They both earned their Masters, PhDs, and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Oldenburg under Prof. Dr. Peter Schupp, often traveling between Germany and Guam for Acropora mass spawnings. Since 2012, Sam has managed the research aquarium facilities at ICBM, and both continue their scientific work at the University. In December 2020, they achieved Germany’s first planned Acropora spawning using a Spawning Lab LLC container, leading to multiple successful spawnings of over 10 Acropora species. Their research centers around understanding and improving upon the larval settlement stages. Sam works closely with Tropic Marin, who has supported and helped fund their research for the past few years. In 2024, they founded SciReef LLC, aiming to produce and sell ‘Made in Germany’ corals by the end of 2025, advancing both coral conservation and the aquarium market.
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https://www.coralspawninglab.org/
More info on the work done by Sam, Mareen and SciReef:
https://www.scireef.com/
https://www.instagram.com/scireef/
https://uol.de/en/news/article/korallenforschende-erhalten-exist-gruendungsfoerderung-8861
https://uol.de/icbm/umweltbiochemie/aquarium/coral-spawning-in-germany
http://www.tropicmarin-usa.com
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welcome to the Beyond The Reef podcast where I talk to experts and researchers in the reef aquarium hobby discussing a broad range of topics from corals and reef biology to water chemistry and equipment we take a deep dive into our guest’s methods techniques and top brief skeping tips my name is Adam southernland and I am the owner operator of frag garage corals based out of British Columbia Canada hey what’s up everyone welcome to today’s episode I am joined by two phds also husband and wife couple Dr Maran Mohler and Dr Samuel nitzer who do work on Coral reproduction and spawning out of the oldenberg university in Germany a lot of This research builds around the Jamie Crags Coral spawning lab research so if you haven’t seen my episode with Jamie I would say go back and watch that one and get well versed in all of the stages of development before we get into this one uh with Samm and Marine I really wanted to get into a lot of the very specific areas they’ve been working in this space and one of the cool things is that they have developed these hybridized captive rais corals they plan on bringing to the German market for sale so you can check out their website it’s called syree I’ll leave a link to that in the description of this episode this podcast is now officially brought to you by fauna Marine I use a lot of fauna Marine Products myself as well as their icps and I think they are an excellent company and I definitely get behind what they do I wouldn’t take on a SP sponsor if I didn’t also if you’re looking for ICP Consulting through fona Marine I will be an ICP consultant soon so you can select me from the list and book a consultation with me as per usual I ask that everyone hit that subscribe button like share and comment on this episode let us know what you think and if you want to send me a tip make a financial contribution I have a patreon which is patreon.com beyond theere Reef podcast or you can also send a PayPal at Beyond The Reef @gmail.com I hope you enjoyed this episode and please let us know what you think I guess a good place to start is uh are you guys hobbyists initially that kind of got into this like can you kind of give me like an early on early stages how you got into this yes no so that’s basically the short answer yes so um I have been a hobbyist or aquarist for pretty much almost as far as I can think back so I got my first uh tank I got when I started Elementary School fresh water tank the Guppies and the usual stuff always had that Fascination for aquatic Critters uh so I had always Aquaria got my first seawater tank at 16 uh back then was all metal haights and a lot of makeshift stuff bunch of soft Coral so kind of primitive but always uh stuck to the Hobby and then when I got into University at also a coral tank at my student apartment and uh so but by the time we got more into the coral science part and there was more traveling involved I had to give up my own personal tank um but soon after um when we um started to work here at University of oldenberg there was the new aquarium facility being set up and then in 2012 2013 I took over the um management of the of the facility which I’m still running to this day and then I was uh back into the M Marine Aquarium uh mhm fun my hands in the water cool so you kind of started as a hobbyist got super busy with school and then you were able to actually be a hobbyist kind of as a profession in a way to at a at a high level so and Marine and I was never really um a hobbyist I always wanted to be a marine biologist I always was interested in the science part and uh yeah that came way later like yeah once we got together we we met at a university became a couple and I took care of his aquarium when he was on Long holidays but yeah and yeah then it started as like really the interest from the scientific side and it’s necessary to keep the corals happy and then we were really lucky that Sam Sam already had that background because in the University setting there’s very like basically no people that actually know how to keep a coral yeah very very few like that actually know how to keep corals happy so without Sam’s background and not been able to do the scientific work we were able to do yeah it’s good to have the Blue Thumb for sure as they as they would put it um yeah so you so you were interested you were take you were doing marine biology and but you didn’t you didn’t really necessarily know it would go in this direction as far as farming and spawning corals and stuff like that I imagine oh no we got the idea way later so um yeah we started working with juvenile corals with coral Arvey um with coral settlement we were really interested in how like all the stressors our like we put on corals we know quite a bit what we do with adults but we know very little what we do to the what how the juvenile stages react so that was really lot of our um scientific Focus so to do that you have to generate juvenile corals yeah which is not that easy but better better at it and the one year we had like 30,000 juvenile corals juvenile and yeah Sam being from the aquarium hobby he said like Marine do you have any idea what that would be worth if on the market and I was like no no no no no clue I guess I guess so so yeah that’s that kind of was uh how the idea was born we actually the methods we started to develop could become just because we have mentioned that the methods uh corresponding and all that that didn’t happen in the in aquarium setting but that happened in a field station so we started to work with Professor Peter shup who is who used to be a professor at the University of Guam that’s where we met him first island chain of the Marianas yeah basically they have a really nice University Marine Biology Institute so we used to go there almost every year since 2010 for the mass spawning in in in summer um so that’s where we started to to work with the cor spawning that makes sense because I saw in your uh Skype uh yeah thing it said Guam USA and I was like that’s not right you guys are Germany but you must have spent a fair bit of time there and I bet that was a pretty cool place to do research and probably like live for a little while hey oh it’s an amazing place for sure it’s definitely our second home we’ve been there on and off all the time way less now recent years but yeah yeah I was lucky enough to go last year for a couple weeks um but yeah it used to be much longer trips always for the summer spawning and we used to go there almost uh every year so um in 2011 our professor Peter shupi went to switch to University of oldenberg so we stayed in his lab and basically have been ever since we did our masters in this lab and PhD post talk and so on so we used to go travel back to back and forth to Guam had to continue the work with the juvenile corus settlement cues and effects of of temperature stress and all that um but then I don’t know if you probably remember but there was a pandemic hitting and something right yeah that had a pretty bad impact on our travel plans yeah basic so that was all yeah yeah I I would imagine that that period of time probably gave you a little bit of time to focus on your research at home too though I mean you probably made quite a bit of progress here yeah yeah yeah without the pandemic we wouldn’t have made as fast or as progress as quickly as we did in with like xc2 spawning spawning because at the time we had a collaboration or we still collaborate in with the Tropic Marin we had a um a research project between University of aldenberg and them um that aimed to optimize methods of spawning and rearing and um at the time when when the traveling was out of question um luckily um Jamie Craigs started his company producing spawning systems yeah and uh so we had Tim and Vince and Mike um build systems into a remodel or an old shipping container basically the the lab in the box and the instructions the instruction manual ex so the financial support of propic marage we were able to to obtain the the container Cool and then actually start the the spawning operations here in Willam sof awesome yeah so I mean obviously Jamie Craigs is sort of uh early innovator of a lot of this stuff and uh absolutely like we wouldn’t have tried without the knowledge that he was able to do it yeah yeah CU it’s very very different like we we were really good doing these things in the field but of course it is different doing it in an aquarium setting very very different so he was really the first one to do it and we all the others are just following he’s the OG Coral Daddy yeah yeah for sure I guess some of the things that like i’ I’ve detailed I mean back to the episode I did with Jamie it’s about 2 hours and 40 minutes long it’s long but we go through every you know part from the settlement the spawning to the settlement right through you know all the different species he worked with so I think we probably won’t discuss some of those details but what I’m going to want to try to get into with you guys is some things that you’ve maybe discovered on your own or or done differently uh because it seems like youve produced some hybrids that look pretty damn cool and like that might be where you know some of your energy is focused on I bet you guys talk to Jamie a lot as far as exchanging information you know the first time actually on Guam when he was there for a workshop in 2014 or 13 I think 14 or 15 I would say but yeah a little while back for sure yeah we got along really well right away he’s a great guy and he’s just so passionate for the coral work and it’s it’s so great what he has done for sure yeah I mean his focus is really strongly on like figuring out how it works how the system works how they are spawning how how you can manipulate it and he’s done amazing amazing work in that regard so um yeah that is not really our Focus um so we really want to try to get Productions up for aquarium purposes but then also later on maybe for refr purposes because it is one thing to get the calls to spawn it is not easy but I would say a lot of people that can keep AC acrop really happy would be able to do it when they set up a system like that but this is really just the beginning having the coral spawn and then having the embryos develop is a little bit tricky already but then having the larv settle in high numbers and then having the recruits develop in high numbers survive in high numbers this is the trickiest part I would say yeah so that actually brings me to a question uh there was an article I found on the oldenberg uh website and it mentioned um that you guys were working on a specific uh material uh that was more I guess ideal for settlement uh can you kind of tell me a little bit about that and kind of how you came to that yeah yeah so the settlement process is uh we have been studying that or the group of of our professor has been studying that for around 15 years or even longer I mean that settlement is one of the most crucial points in the life of a coral right the place where the larv attaches and Metamorphoses into poly is where it’s going to spend the rest of its life right so if the spot is a good spot the life can be potentially hundreds of years or at least tens of years bad SP it can be over in a couple of hours so they have to make a really distinctive very good decision and um this decision is mediated by chemicals I’m not saying it’s exclusively the chemicals but uh chemicals play a an important role in that and these interactions is also the the interactions between chemical compounds and biology is the one of the main focuses of our working group it’s called the environmental biochemistry so that’s basically right uh in the uh in the focus of of of the research so as Jamie also said in the in in the episode The crustos Coraline algae are a preferred settlement substrate for the Coral larvey in nature and also in the lab of course yeah um so on these um CCA there is a specific U microbial Community right so the years we’ve been isolating um bacterial strains isolating them like in individual strains more than 100 over time and tested them individually whether or not they would induce the settlement of coral larve that was actually a Marine’s Bachelor thesis uh that she did on Guam isolating the the CCA bacteria and then testing them individually there was one specific strain of the Doos pseudo Ultram Monas um it’s like a pink growing bacterium that induces the um settlement very reliably or very effectively and over the years um we were of course not not just the two of us there’s a whole team of chemists and people involved and other PhD students so it was a big operation to um fractionate the or to to extract all the chemicals that the bacterium produces and then go step by step and and try to figure out which molecule is um involved or is inducing the settlement and then by 2021 the the molecule um or a molecule could be isolated and identified that that induces the settlement in a whole variety of species so not just the acroporid but also leptastrea and other brers so it seems to be kind of a universally uh potent settlement okay so just as a little um make sure I’m following so there is a molecule that has to do with when the larae is comfortable settling essentially right but you also said that there’s a bacterial strain that’s it’s competitive did you say it was competitive or or was it what was what was the relationship exactly no so the there is the CCA on top of the CCA there is a bunch of different uh bacteria and some of the bacteria or at least one of the bacteria produces one compound that we isolated from him that induces the the coral induces the sment it might be more than that one but this is one we found and it seems to be working quite well over a bunch of different species okay my immediate thought on that is is that a bacteria strain that is commonly found in a closed like home aquarium system or would you have had to have sourced this out somehow like is it a common strain I mean that the group or the genus is pretty common on CCA that particular strain um we isolated from CCA from Guam and our colleagues now looked at CCA from Zanzibar from from other places around the world and they could also find quite a number of very closely related strains not the exact identical one uh and now they’re in the process of evaluating that these strains are producing the same compound in the same but we haven’t actually looked for it in our aquarium interesting well it might be there was very common it sounds like it is a pretty critical you know bacteria to have probably in a systems I mean I wonder past the settlement phase is the only one there might be a bunch more that produce compounds it it really doesn’t have to be like I’m I’m actually sure like in the nature it’s not just that one bacterium or even that one compound but we found one that works well in the lab yes so ecologically it might not be the only one and probably is probably yeah definitely definitely now since we have the the compound the challeng is now how to to apply it in a way that I can use it in a targeted way meaning I use the compound and I expose the larv to it and and ultimately after the lar settle on the substrate where I want them to on a substrate where I can rear them that I can produce in huge in large numbers and it’s easy to handle and so on and the CCA is it’s very easy or not super easy but it grows uh fairly well in in Aquaria so you can use ceramic tiles or uh what have you and have the CCA grow on it and then use that as a settlement substrate that does work it’s not super reliable always yeah um but it works but you also there it comes with a array of of problems right the CCA is not a big fan of a coral sitting on top of it right so they try to get rid of it or overgrow it and then you have a whole zo of Critters like uh yeah other bacteria ciliates crustations like tiny tiny crustations that like to to eat baby corals and I always say that the freshly settled corals are best described as Tiny helpless and tasty because I mean just protein and fat and they sit there they can’t do much so I me even the tiny asterina starfish right they’re the equivalent to the crown of thorns for the big corals one little a whole bunch baby corals in one night we’ve seen it geez okay so um that makes me think um I mean jimie had been using he’d been co-culturing these urchins to a very specific size to clean basically make the settlement surfaces more um you know accommodating to these larvi so were you guys doing that as well or were you trying to find an alternative way no we haven’t we haven’t tried that yet I think the approach is is really awesome and it’s uh yeah at the same time you produce corals and you produce the urchins so I me that’s like bird with one stone that’s fantastic um but our approach is to use a more of a sterile um settlement tile um based on ceramics or um polymers where you are sure that there is no competitive organisms on it you just have your tile know ceramic 3D printed sand what whatever so there’s different uh different Avenues we we try and and test out um but yeah ultimately we want to have the larae on a clean settlement substrate um so we don’t have to deal with all that competition yeah but that settlement substrate it sounds like you guys are putting a lot of attention into the microbiome of that surface and maybe the paracity is probably a component as well like would some of these uh materials be put in close to the time that it’s spawn happen or would they be long established in Your settlement system ahead of time we have both so we have natural grown um biofilms as well but also just completely clean just like okay couple of hours in the seawat before we actually expose them to the lar okay interesting yeah and and I mean which which have you found you’ve had better results with I mean there’s probably pros and cons depends on the species okay okay yeah it’s always different you think you figured it out and then with the next species everything is different and you have to figure it out all over again so yeah that’s that we’ve really it’s really surprising even just within acropora you can have huge differences actually okay interesting uh can be frustrating for sure yeah yeah for sure well and I mean obviously not having to co-culture the urchins is uh saving you a stage and it looks like you’re having good results for settlement as it is like I’ve seen some of the pictures of all the tiles covered in you know in happy looking corals starting to form so you know know we’re pretty confident that we are in a really good path we definitely have to get even better at it but yeah we’ve made a bunch of good steps the last years uh that we’re confident that we can can be able to accomplish it okay yeah and actually speaking of which I meant to we kind of talked about this the beginning before we started recording but can you guys kind of explain what you guys have for facilities um because there’s sort of a farm facility and then you have a coral spawning lab so maybe just give me like a little breakdown of what you guys are kind of running ultimately so right now we’re still employed at the University of aldenberg we’re both researchers uh there um I’ve been in charge of the quarium facility facility that has been used for all sorts of um aquaculture Pro projects competition between corals and sponges and all that so that’s one large recirculating system of about 6 and a half thousand liters around 4050 tanks um where we keep all kinds of scaran corals but in there we don’t do any climate simulation so every day the same basically we do is on growout and all the other projects that are going on that we’re not um that deeply involved with but have to to manage the facility anyways and then as I mentioned the pandemic hit there was no traveling anymore so we decided we need a facility um yeah one of of Jamie systems basically or three if you will um but in our Institute there was no square meter available anymore basically every room is fought upon and it’s kind of like a coral reef right everybody wants the wants the space yeah yeah but uh there was a little space in the in the garden left um so we had the idea to why not as to to to have everything incorporated into an old shipping container that we can then put into the garden that’s what we ultimately had done and so this is in is this in your guys’s home is or or is it at the University so this is just behind our research facility uh there’s a spawning container so we just walk back and forth a bun that’s all right yeah cool cool so it’s like the the um the seawater it has the same source with the sea one room where we mix our sea water so we use Tropic Marin Pro Reef we have been using that since 2017 very successfully now uh so from that mixing facility the the big aquarium facility is supplied and then there is also a pipeline going to the to the um container with the spawning system so the water is all just a a full like connected system as far as water water water chemistry that’s easy so this just where we mix it so and then the the big aquarium is one recirculate or two uh recirculating systems and then the in the spawning container we have three recirculating systems okay so you just get the the the new saltwater is essentially what’s planted in not not the system so we have five individual system okay yes yeah the mixing facility is about 10,000 liters that we always have uh on hold uh and then we have one pipe basically with like sea water RI um tap water uh that goes to the to the shipping container man that must be nice that must be nice not you’re not mixing up any salt like in small batches it’s just ready to go all the we could do although I have to haul the the 20 kilo bags up to like 2 met 20 to get them into the into the mix but it’s good workout so I don’t yeah yeah got to get some of that in okay so that’s the the research facility where we have in the container we do the spawning then we have in the main building we have have all the labs we need we have a climate room we have um like all the chemistry equipment we have a mass spectrometer we have extraction labs and and all that and all the the colleagues that work on the in the chemistry um field so that’s all the research part and now we’re in the process of transitioning from the the research into the commercial application um meaning that we’re setting up a whole new facility on a different location also in the same city and s a few kilometers away we’re already renting the the the the location and we’re setting up now the um a fully new um yeah facility where we have quite a bunch of systems and we’ll produce for the yeah commercially there so this this system will be to sell corals commercially that you are spawning like not asexual fragmented corals like you’re going to be just purely doing it from from scratch corals yes sir made in Germany I’m uh I’m envious of what Germany’s going to have going on in a few years um that’s super cool so okay um maybe this is a good time to transition back to kind of some of the spawning science stuff um you guys have had some good results with hybridizing between species and well well it seems like a few at least seem so I mean we’re we’re pretty sure um it’s they’re hybrids between tenous and echinata so the the parents we got from Fiji okay as tenures yeah and they also look more or less like tenures right but there was a paper coming out last year I’m sure you you heard that now in Australia the tenur is called kti and then there’s the Bia and Indo yeah and so on they got split up so the actual tenous is just in in Fiji and I think Tonga but Fiji for sure and in Fiji is also aada and even though they look very different they’re genetically very closely related so when we cross the the the Fiji tenuous that we got The Offspring has a huge um I would say variability in the in their Mor morphology so some of them have really long tubular corales like Ain has yeah and some of growing more tenuous like so the thought that we have is that the parents are already hybrids and by crossing the hybrids into an F2 then you get the variation so that’s often when you do hybrids the first generation they all look very similar and then when you cross these again then you get the unequal distribution of who gets which trades so that’s basically uh what we’re thinking what is happening right now but we’re not Coral geneticists so we don’t know for certain but all indications are that it’s the hybrids but we actually have a coral geneticist um took samples and so hopefully in the near future we’ll know for sure what is sitting in our tanks yeah it shows the potential that um that is in there and also in our um operation we we plan to to play around with closely related species to see where is also what is a species right where yeah yeah like I mean because the species is going to be a certain percentage of shared G uh DNA right like it it is probably I don’t know if they’re 94% the same there or who knows right there’s a percentage where you call them it’s very difficult like we are really not and I don’t want to become one because I know a bunch of cor geneticist and like the corals are just they’re just so hard yeah there just a really small group of scientists and yeah it’s really hard to make a decision okay where does a new species start and where it doesn’t because the morphology is one thing and then the genes like sometimes the morphology can look completely different any people any person in the reef would call them completely different names but then the genes are so yeah and and to to then weigh these things the morphology and the genes how quot they look it’s it’s it’s just yeah that’s goes to the point of uh how they had reclassified uh Acora SP spathulata along with milora and I think prostrata like a couple of those species that look similar but do Express fairly differently they actually said they’re all mpora now which is an interesting to go that direction rather than like oh actually eight different species no all these are just one so you know as far as so I’m not too deep into that but I know that there’s a lot of work being done on acropora right now and I think ultimately in the end it’s going to be like something like 600 species or some insane number it turns out that there’s also a lot of regional speciation and um species that were thought to be having a huge range are suddenly split into really small Regional um populations right and then you have a species that just exists on one ATL or one side of one island chain also makes it difficult for conservation right if you only have the population or one species on one side of the island you’re one bleaching event away from Extinction yeah yeah that’s a good point uh okay so back to the hybridization thing so I think you were saying that you you had the tenuous and echinata that were obviously accepting each other well but that may have been because they were kind of a h in the first place or genetically so close that you know so um this was something the parents they really looked alike yeah yeah I mean it’s very much like human offspring it’s like you could have you know parents with different hair color and eye color and then the kids will get a combination of both and um I guess it kind of surprised you that you’re some of the morphs were uh as different as they were yeah that is really the fun thing I think about approach in general I mean this is like really the first time that somebody’s really trying try to put out large numbers of sexually produced corals and just like with any other uh animal or with any plant once you go into the sexual reproduction you get the whole variety you can cross individuals that look very interesting and that you want to bring out more so yeah I think it opens up a lot more diversity in our uh tanks so you see like the same like with the tenuis they look alike in and in shape and The Offspring they have a huge variety they all very different and we also see that with other species as well where honestly the parents look a bit boring but then the juveniles they all look different and they they they show all the color variation they are able to produce so cool that’s exciting but I guess the thing is is from settlement to actually starting to look like what it’s going to be as an adult like what’s the time timeline you’re looking at cuz that’s not going to be you know a short amount of time depends on the species so often the milora they have this really neon green they produce a lot of the green fluorescent protein they’re juveniles up to like half a year and then that starts to fade away and then they get their more or less adult coloration but it changes over time for sure and for some species um um we’re so one example is the acropora aera so we had a big spawning last October um of two green parents basically the mother or I say the mother because there was one huge um genotype so we have probably 30 kilo of that one that’s spawn and the the second colony the second genotype that spawned was a one that was maybe like like this size really and released yeah very very small or comparatively small I released just I know 100 or more bundles so just enough to get sperm and then fertilize the uh huge number of eggs from from the other colonies I know who is the that and the yeah yeah cool so one is neon green the other one is normal green but The Offspring is also purple and blue quite diversity so there’s colors in The Offspring that weren’t expressed in either of the parents at at the moment because that’s the first time that we are hearing them I them I couldn’t find basically much about their juvenile coloration so they’re now what is it they were spawn yeah around N9 month so at the moment there’s quite a variation okay so how mons if that will change again so it yeah it probably depends on the species yeah that’s exciting though so what size are they at this nine Monon point from settlement okay yeah so there’s some videos from from the interview I had a bunch of them in the how would I say in the in the exhibition tank that we had there so about yeah like like that size and we already have some pictures uh of what they look like right now on Instagram as well okay yeah I’ll show them I’ll show them along in the video here while we discuss and we aim for the ten is I mean there’s still potential to to increase the the growth of uh the speed of growth um for the tenous we look at about one year after spawning to have them at like four to five cm which would be the the size we would um like give them into the market yeah but we also don’t want to rear them too too fast right they’re supposed to be healthy and and have a strong skeleton so we don’t hear them at at super high alkalinity alkalinity is usually a bit on the lower end compared to uh us standards okay yeah I’m going to get into some water chemistry stuff in a bit but I’m curious if any have any of these um you know baby corals you’ve grown have they gone out into any hobbyist systems like as a test like or have you kept everything to to yourself for now yeah yeah so so there’s a plan there’s a plan to release at a certain point you’re just kind of gearing up for that I was going to ask if some of these corals that were captive raised um might show more potential to be a lot harder in captivity I mean that’s kind of the goal that’s what we see and what the assumption is you know that they have been under aquarium condition from second one they’ve never seen a reef they’ve never experienced ocean conditions right so they only know the uh conditions of thear water chemistry and the the prevalent pathogens and all that M so compared to the imported root stocks we still get um some of our brute stock is still imported of course I mean they have to come from somewhere um they The Offspring is a lot less susceptible to like bacterial infections and fluctuations and in in water chemistry and also the the ones I took to interview the the big ones are 2 and a half years and they’re pretty decent size and and they were doing fine the like from the first day to the last nice poet extension uh so I think yeah with the imported animals I probably would not have uh dared to to try that yeah yeah so you kind of knew you could get away with I mean you probably haven’t lost any have you lost any like have you been pretty yeah so they’ve been Hardy yeah yeah on on at the inter no but yeah of course in our research we have uh yeah but once there are like over the hurdle of like three four months they’re pretty Hardy like at the beginning they’re like there’s uh yeah we lose a bunch when they’re tiny uh but once they’re a couple of months old we use very very little actually okay yeah the early bottlenecks are the the big ones right so the settlement is a big bottleneck and then the initial survival uh they start to calcify after a few days so depending on species temperature like after two days they start to calcify and um start to take up the zanelli yeah um you also talked with Jamie about the uptake of Z which is cral step in the life of the coral so you can we also feed them early on as soon as the gastric system is developed after about a week they can take up or they can take up food basically that’s also the way they acquire the zantell um so okay but in the aquarium system the density of these anell is really low with the UVC and ozone if you use it and skimmers and particle filters and and all that um so the natural let’s call it natural um density of the Free Living heant tell and the aquarium system is really low um and you can compensate by feeding them but if they don’t take it up by like week three four five then the survival goes way down um so we um basically grow susanty um outside of the aquarium and then add them at the time to really ramp up the numbers I was okay you just answered so many things that I was that I was going to ask about the the acquiring of the zanelli or I guess some biod Denasia is kind of the more proper term for it as far as I understand yes okay so CU it’s and also like I mean I always thought it was one one strain but Jamie sort of clarified that it’s tends to be a a few different strains yeah there a whole bunch I think there’s how many more than 100 are known total but yeah that’s also like we call it strange because we don’t even want to start what is a species yeah yeah yeah so if you guys are culturing it separately that kind of brings up a question like are you focusing on strains that you think are maybe more resilient to temperature swings and things like that maybe a little bit heartier when it comes to bleaching events because that’s the part of the science that I can see applying to you know restoration know we definitely seen it this one study that’s not published yet but we definitely want to uh yeah where we also raised these juvenile corals under elevated temperatures and we found they can resist like we had juvenile calls under 31 degrees Celsius for a year which is I don’t know if you think in far I think in both I mean it’s funny in Canada we we we were on we were on the the metric system but then we sometimes we just you know I’m 6 foot three you know I mean I say things in to I don’t know yeah so um so that is basically so that is a temperature where the parents of these juveniles they 100% of them died within three weeks they can withstand these temperatures for a year without actually like any more morality than the one juveniles that we raised under 29 degrees CSUS so uh yeah so we definitely see that these ju or we really think that these juveniles can be much more hearty especially when they pick up different symbion so we already know for a while now that dep um the uh same species of coral can Harbor different strains of algae and depending on what Algae they Harbor they can be more or less sustainable to uh bleaching or to higher temperatures um so we also we know know a bunch of the strains that are more Hardy that can tolerate these higher temperatures better um Unfortunately they usually grow slower uh with those um with those uh algae strains so and that’s actually also what we saw so they survived just as well but they were much smaller interesting H I wonder why that is that seems like such a spe yeah so we so scientist they they just give give the cor less basically I see give away less of uh the the energy they’re producing so or at least it’s one M every everything in life comes at a price and if you want to survive at Celsius I mean you’re have to pay for it and it’s smaller we know that there there is huge variety of uh algae that can tolerate 26 28 degre Celsius really well but there’s very few actually that can tolerate the the higher temperatures um so yeah so for like ref restoration purposes that’s absolutely what people should look into what like what if when once we start in that field that would absolutely be what we should would focus on um but of course that’s not what we want for the aquarium trade we want the calls to grow faster we want them to be healthy and happy and have the symbiot that they are just most comfortable with and most healthy with under like Co cooler temperatures where usually people keep them and those strains would not be the right for yeah okay but and and just a little question uh would different strains of zanthi affect coloration or is it generally always Brown I mean that’s kind of my understanding from talking to Lou eus like he sort of said you know it’s you’ve got the catenoids and the what is it the catenoids and the chlorophyll and when you get those things together you basically get brown no matter what but yeah Brown Coral yeah so they I’m I I think that it might do a little bit but yeah no the really the bright beautiful colors that we see that is the coral itself and not not the symbion so but these are the fluorescent proteins so this is basically their UV filter of the coral the sunscreen of the coral and there was a huge variety even Within species I mean that’s what we see right if you think of a tenuis or KY or whatever you want to call it now but we we know they can come in so many different colors and even within the same wath you can have individuals with a very different coloration and uh yeah that that’s just their own ability that is in their jeans and that is also what what we want to find when we cross them yeah yeah definitely the green and some that produce more of the pink and yeah that is really beautiful see so um again I’m just I’m so curious on this hybridization thing uh when I talked to Jamie he said that uh milora was kind of he called it the dirty girl of The Reef kind of the more the one that maybe is more accepting of different different types of uh different species so I mean you’re probably finding I don’t know how many different species you’re spawning right now but are you finding that you know some are compatible and some there’s just there’s no compatibility like milor is obviously a little more accepting of different species but what what have you found there yeah with a variety of species we we have around 10 species um so there’s always or sometimes the case that you have one colony of one species spawning and and none of the other con specifics but one other species and then of course we try to to hybridize them um but so far we haven’t had any any luck because usually it was a tenuous and Morada I mean of course I I don’t throw everything away I just put them together and see everything works out but so far in that regard um was not we also had nauta and humus and that didn’t pan out tenuous milora so that the accidental crosses we were able to do uh didn’t work out so far okay but with a new facility and more space um and also the the focus on on that particular questions then we’ll try to to to cross closely related species yeah so that hasn’t been the focus yet but now looking at what happened with our yeah presumed tenuous it turned out to to likely be a mix of two species um of course now that’s on the um high up on the agenda yeah and what we could also Imagine is just um using corals from different regions maybe for example a tenuous and the candy which we used to all call tenuous right they they are probably pretty similar we could try to put these in the same system and cross those and see see what happens there uh that would be scientifically very interesting can because that is like one one answer of like is it a species is it not if you can cross it um well or how well you can cross it uh that is scientifically interesting but of course also for for us and to see how The Offspring looks like yeah and and I mean another thing that’s just interesting is if you are just spawning um different genotypes of the same species like you were saying you may still get offspring that don’t look like the parents or just havea and there’s like almost nothing known I would say into the heritability of of coloration right and the the the color protein from AC copora I think there’s like 90 different proteins have been identified so far there’s probably many more but yeah as far as I know there is no knowledge about what happens when you cross like on a scientific basis what happens or how is that uh going through the generations figure out what happens the green and a yellow and yeah my kind of thinking on that you know what makes sense to me from you know just thinking about how nature works is it’s you know creating that variability uh intentionally just to add diversity so that if you know one color maybe a fish is more likely to pick at that type and maybe it’ll pick at the red mpora but not at the green one you know if it has the ability to vary what its Offspring will look like then you know that increases his chances of survival slightly I guess yeah yeah no it’s a really good question like why did they not just come up with one sunscreen I mean it’s just UVA and UVB it doesn’t really change right why do they need so many different compounds to protect themselves really really definitely more to it yeah and diversity is always key to survival yeah that’s always see um say regardless which organism yeah you increase diversity of the population they always have a better chance of making it through tough times totally yeah and not just color variance but like you say growth variance is a different growth strategy like the echinata is got the polyps are more spaced apart and maybe it’s able to grow you know out faster than the tenuous is or something like that which you know may give it some competitive Advantage but you know it comes at a cost in some ways too right it’s not it’s not as strong and rigid so you know easier to break in a storm or from a fish crashing around or whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah okay so um on the sort of spliced coral Chimera Coral kind of thing I’m curious if you guys have had any mix uh mixed uh success with stuff like that yeah you mean like the early Fusion yeah yeah so um I guess you know again this is another thing if people want to see uh the specific details on this I talk about it in the episode with Jamie but uh I’m curious if you guys have had results with that too yeah we we also have chimeras also right now we have a bunch and and that is also a focus we we want to to look into um up to which age are they able to to fuse because it seems like in the early um phases after settlement the the immune response that tells them hey that’s that’s not me right they should fight that guy that is seems to be switched off so they can fuse and then form the Chimera and that makes them a bigger Colony at an earlier time and they can share nutrients and and all that and then of course and also you have the if it’s two Colores then you have two like a spliced coral with like two two colorations so that is of course very very intriguing and it’s also something we want to to go more into uh to do it in a targeted way to Yeah by Design create multicolored genotypes or colonies yeah and that’s probably going to happen more when you have a lot of well probably easier if it’s the same species spawning at the same time and you can isolate you know some from one and some from another but I I guess it’s still complicated to you know know what you’re putting together at that point right when you’re collecting from a spawn that’s say you have 10 different milor spawning the same species right so I’m not aware that there is um chimeras of different species so it has to be the same species but different individuals yeah so when they grow together I I mean we could try but I wouldn’t be very hopeful cuz we already see like it it sometimes works well that they grow together and grow in like yeah you can see one Colony with like two or three different colors on different sides uh but often it doesn’t really work so well uh so I wouldn’t be too hopeful that the if lry from two different species close to so they really do have to be the same species yeah yeah okay yeah and then this one I would think like we haven’t tried it like corals they always surprise you you think they’re so simple but they surprise us every day and they do things differently than we think so maybe yeah definitely what what helps with that is is uh when you can’t settle them in a targeted way so they actually settle where you want them to so you have to distribute it evenly on a substrate and then you can put them to together in in a targeted way and pick the different color Mor to see which one can use and which can’t I mean for you guys there must be some fun to just you know having a bunch settle and just seeing what happens too CU some of them may settle next to each other some of them may not but you’re going to see what happens as they start to grow out so sometimes they so there’s too many settling in in one spot so they tend to because they they benefit if they create the Camaro especially in the beginning that they’re bigger but if you have a a blob like 50 lar that settle next to each other and you have a chimera or that they fuse together early on after a few days into one they’re usually not going to make it then if it’s there seems to be a cut off I can’t say where that is but if it’s more than like three four or something like that then so that’s kind of when the system so we also have them sometimes throwing settling in patches then you have like 100 or 200 in one spot and kind of sad to see because yeah it kind of looks cool in the yeah yeah you’re like holy crap look how many settled here and then they’re just all fighting at a certain point right yeah or if they pretty early on they die off actually yeah that’s that’s hard to see but uh yeah I mean you guys are obviously having good uh good survival rates at this point but it’s been 10 years or so you’ve been kind of at this for just about yeah more than that yeah yeah okay so no no joke it’s a serious uh Endeavor and you guys have the the education behind it too so yeah um okay so I guess I want to talk about coral Health a little bit because you know we can all assume that if you are getting corals to the point of spawning in the first place they are extremely healthy and have you know excess resources to produce these egg and sperm bundles uh so kind of take me through maybe a little bit of your feeding protocol and how you kind of approach nutrition and nutrients um and we’re talking specifically SPS or Acora you’ve been spawning right so yeah so for the basic water chemistry parameter if we don’t do anything extraordinary I would say we usually have alkalinity between seven seven and a half so rather on the a bit on the lower end um what surprises uh some people is that we have the phosphate usually a bit higher around 0.1 milligrams um so they they seem to really enjoy that um so when it goes around 0.05 or or more than that then I get a bit nervous because when you dip into like the really uh depletion then they they usually don’t respond too well so I like to have the phosphates a bit higher nitrate not not so much high around one milligram in that bpk number um yeah for the feeding we use how would I say uh commercial food but we also mix our own basically uh we take everything that lives on the ocean and and run it through a blender and then they they can pick whatever they they they feel like basically so that’s uh something we have been doing for yeah quite a while now so we prepare it ourselves but yeah we also add stuff like the Arctic cus PS um then I used to do phal plankton um what happened sorry at the moment we don’t have the time for toy the Plankton so we use uh concentrates and add that into the and then otherwise the food is just a mix of Seafoods uh that you that you and freeze okayo basically slurry and then ideally um it’s it’s being fed at night so that’s their natural feeding time okay and it comes quite handy that in the spawning systems um the the days are set in a way that Sunset is around noon right so spawning doesn’t start in the evening but early afternoon so you get home at a at a reasonable time um so that also enables us to just regularly feed the corals when they’re yeah responding the best to food at night yeah so when all open Stander then we can provide them with the food and one thing also that in my experience that it shouldn’t be overdone uh with a food not too often because if there’s too much um organ or they too take up too much Organics I think at some point their microbiome is is getting a bit out of hand so the frozen food do you feed it every day or is it alternating days it’s alternating yeah okay because I’ve actually wondered recently I do feed a very similar mix to what you guys do um you know I blend a bunch of seafood I add some micis and and Brian as well and then sometimes I put Kus in there just like you guys uh but I’ve actually wondered about almost too much Amino amino acids or you know some of these fatty acids like maybe a little bit too much maybe causes issues have you kind of found something like that I think it’s kind of what you’re just saying I mean I I didn’t do it like in a replicated scientifically sound uh way but my experience if you feed them too much they they tend to be more susceptible to bacterial infections that are hard to to fight I mean they always respond really well to the food but um you know if I drink five shots I also respond really well but if I do that every day it’s not going to pan out in the long run yeah that’s true maybe not too fitting comparison so um yeah we I like to feed them but not um like continuously but and I guess an important question is are these systems stocked with fish as well like is that part of it yeah yeah so we do have fish but usually the the the basic cleaning through yeah like acus the file fish and a bunch of um copper bands and her herbivores like surgeons and rabbit fish and all that um so the fish stocks are not super high so we also supplement ammonium uh to to provide this suant with the ammonium that they need and and phosphate um the phosphate we add as the um recently um the the new product from Tropic Marin the phosed phosed yeah that provides the phosphate in a particulate form so you don’t um how would you say uh do a blanket dosing that that every organism can use but more targeted that the the phosphate is available to the Coral in the coral basically so that um I’m yeah I’m quite a fan of okay yeah so your phosphates would probably go to zero if you didn’t supplement in some way though I’m assuming yeah yeah okay yeah um yeah and I’ve tried that fos feed we just have a lot of coral compared to the fish we have yeah yeah the Coral water per water volume ratio is high it’s similar to my systems too yeah yeah we have some tanks that where that’s barely water and yeah okay yeah so yeah the fos feed is definitely a good product thing like the um normal dosing system you do you do the classic balling uh system I we go through a lot of volume I think the big system is running through about three liters of Bing solution per day um which is quite a bit but on the other hand it’s very easy to to prepare right a calcium reactor would probably maybe be more I would say cost efficient or I know I haven’t done the calculations but a calcium reactor is also not as easy to to to run yeah to di in we have people working also in the aquarium that don’t have the aquaculture background so if I tell them you take a bucket of water you put in 10 lers and you put x amount of that powder and stir it and then you put it into the the container then I mean everybody can do that and if you start CO2 Bubbles and and uh that stuff and it can be a bit critical especially if you have have high consumption of alkalines so some systems are up to like two degrees per day so if yeah you run into problems and and and you miss one day of dosing them yeah I agree I mean especially celum reactor does have a tendency for the line to get blocked and sometimes it can just be just a little bit and you might not notice and I don’t think there’s flow sensors that detect such a low flow rate particularly accurately so you know you’ll just notice maybe oh maybe the the stream does the stream look a little thinner or a little more dotted than usual yeah but yeah I agree I mean you know obviously pros and cons every system Bing system you you can’t really go wrong in my opinion MH mhm and then you guys are adding thek uh Trace elements as well yeah andk Trace elements um if there is a shortage of some element we also do that in a targeted way we add extra FL Florine or or copper nickel zinc uh what have you um then for monitoring is also a big issue of course um the have the ghl um sensory system in our big system right with pH Redux solity Etc that I can see remotely so I’m pretty happy with that and then in the in the spawning systems we have the Apex um Apex systems uh that give you live data basically um for the dosing we have the alkatronic do tronic um but we don’t let the alkatronic uh do the do the dosing yeah decisions of the of the dosing so that’s more for monitoring and then yeah doing I I dial in by hand because I mean yeah it’s it’s all the technology is all nice but if there is a problem and the the yeah probe has a has an issue yeah no I wouldn’t I wouldn’t want to trust the machine in that case definitely so are you guys doing fairly regular ICP tests on some of the systems yeah yeah who are you usually once a week actually okay or every two weeks at the at the latest that must be nice uh which company are you doing it through so currently we we sent to fora but Tropic Marin is bringing out the thep so oh interesting decision yeah yeah just came out that interest was presented that they they’re um um having their own ICP line and also the element dosing system yeah but it’s just coming onto the market yeah I’m surprised they’re a little late to the party on that actually it seems like oh well not that easy to set up and there’s already a bunch of the market so you want to be good at yeah definitely uh do you know if it’s going to be Ms or OES do you know what the system is O but um there is a new um dosing system or for for corrective and and maintenance dosing where you don’t have I mean they have the single elements but also combined elements like um the elements are set up in groups soal blocks so like the hogen one yeah lock so we know usually they’re they’re used up in a certain ratio so if I um um know iodine is being used more or low then the other halogens are probably equally low so I can dose all of them one and go and the the nice thing about that is that uh the ICP the OES is is not as accurate in the in the low range and there’s some overlap of signals uh so sometimes it’s not it’s hard to to figure out if the the number you get is actually the number of uh or the what is in the water so there’s um the block elements there’s some indicator element that is good to to to read that can be measured accurately and um based on that reading the other ones are um recommended yeah basically can add all of that yeah in one go yeah so that reduces 40 bottles to to just five yeah which makes de complexifies the whole thing yeah I mean as great as the the Moonshine uh method is has been for some people it’s definitely like a daily you know very in involved method so I like I I do like the sound of that but at the end of the day whatever works right whatever works for your lifestyle and whatever works for your tank is exactly yeah nice to have different options out there yeah and we have to want toor quite closely as well because uh we have first of all we have so much consumption and then also when we uh simulate the the um temperature and light Pro throughout the year the consumption very varies a lot by the seasons so there’s just a huge variation all the time in our s uh year simulated system so yeah there you always have to have a close eye on like if the consumption changes um yeah yeah it’s not always the ideal conditions for the corals to be honest so in our Saudi system so if we would use the the original data it would go up to 32 Celsius in summer so we cap it at around 30 but still the you can clearly see that the alkalinity consumption and all that goes quite down in these stressful times also in the Australian system goes up to 29 winter time right now is at 24 so that’s quite the yeah the stretch yeah there must be a temperature where growth is actually where it’s a little on the higher side and growth is it it’s fastest right because I would imagine you’re essentially you know it’s it’s it’s like faster metabolism essentially but at a certain point you start to see a drop off where it’s actually the coral is slightly stressed so the growth slows down so you say that’s is that around 29 or 30 Celsius kind of thing it really depends on the depends on the species too yeah exactly depends on the coral species where they come from what’s even what Algae they Harbor so yeah you can’t really say this is the perfect temperature for all scaran corals or even all cids there there is no one answer for that okay yeah in uh okay um you mentioned that you were dosing ammonia so I wanted to get into that because that’s a little becoming more popular in the North America now too um how long have you been dosing ammonia and kind of why switching to that from nitrate dosing it’s been a couple years at least I would say you like three three maybe more years so I use ammonium nh4 nh4 CL basically and that’s the preferred form of um nitrogen for the zantell and they can also utilize the the the nitrate but that is like energ energetically more expensive to to utilize so the nh4 is um what they what they like um so we do two times a day um there was to see if I can find there was some publication that looked into ammonium concentrations in the reefs and there’s usually two peaks uh at a day in the morning when all the fish get active and feed and then they they excrete right then you have one Peak and then the same in the uh later in the day um so the concentration in the in nature is not always uh the same but there’s also Peaks where they have more available I was just going to say okay that’s interesting so there’s two ammonia spikes in the day it’s kind of like almost like you know if people go take a number two you know twice a day or once a day there’s there’s some kind of consistency to it right but so maybe that there’s some corresponding peak in in for some reason right although I been imagine fish are just kind of constantly just going when they wake up yeah who knows right but either way there’s a peak so okay so are you using uh ammonia bicarbonate is that is that your go-to or some other form ammonium ammonium chloride ammonium chloride okay cool yeah I think you cut out a little bit when you were saying that so just ammonium chloride just dissolve it RI and and that’s yeah solution that use okay so yeah obviously better bioa availability and also the coral can utilize it a lot easier than nitrates and then whatever doesn’t get used of this ammonia would you know in a good established system you know with a lot of you know biology happening in it like maybe larger biomass that extra ammonia is going to get converted into nitrates pretty quickly right exactly so that’s also the way you can track your um if you’re dosing is right so if your nitrates are uh rising up and uh then one thing you could do is reduce the amount of ammonium you put in because that’s the end product is in nitrate okay so yeah exactly that’s what would happen and I’m curious do you from the science kind of side of this this question I’ve been kind of bouncing around for a while is is the ammonia being consumed by the zanelli or is it being consumed by the coral pop or the coral itself like how is that how is it getting utilized so the ammonium is is utilized by predominantly by the zantell okay okay so algae in the system is potentially competing in a way too like other nuisance algae could potentially be competing for ammonium at the same time potentially yeah just one thing I would say because I switched to dosing ammonia maybe three months ago from dosing just straight nitrate um and I actually noticed Less Problem algae in the the tank like reduction of algae so to me it seemed like the zanelli was almost better at utilizing the ammonia um than the problem algae was but I mean it could have been other factors at the same time but uh I just noticed my racks and all everything looked quite a bit cleaner in a fairly short amount of time yeah cool what kind of um ammonium are you using ammonium bicarbonate yeah okay and uh yeah I just split it into three doses so um there’s you know just to not put too much at a time obviously because there’s a danger to the fish so it’s three or four doses a day um you know pretty low concentration and um yeah and I mean I just test my nitrates regularly and they they sit in a kind of an okay range but you guys were saying your nitrates you keep them fairly low like around one yeah yeah yeah I mean sometimes they also get get higher but um yeah ideally around one yeah cuz I guess really at the end of the day what you’re just seeing is the excess that’s left over after you know the corals have taken what they need right so you know in a way yeah yeah but so because based on what you know if you’re if that’s one and then your phosphates are 0.1 you’re kind of more like at 100 to1 kind of ratio or well no that would be no that would be 10 to one that would be 10:1 yeah whereas a lot of people talk about 100 to1 as being the ratio but it sounds like the 10:1 ratio is okay too there’s sort of some Acceptance in that range yeah I think the above one I think there’s a limit to the nitrate um that can be utilized by by the zantell so if it’s above 1 milligram it probably doesn’t make much of a difference to them except you have the negative aspects of yeah higher nitrates I think the driver or the more the driver of the whole thing is the phosphate availability yeah what do you think in terms of like Coral polyps taking in um you know what they need like what percentage would you say is you know particulate food versus bacteria which is energy it gets from zo andell like is there is there kind of a rough guesstimate of what you know a coral really needs yeah it really depends on the species so some definitely need more food uh others only need very little um yeah so and I think they can also do with a bunch of variety you know just like just like we we can we can eat a bunch of carbs so we can e a bunch of protein and you know there’s not just that one answer that is uh that is uh right there is a variety is probably fine but it definitely depends on the species yeah okay but it sounds like you guys are kind of doing a little of everything so it’s kind of cing the base as well but uh do you so we don’t give the bacteria food uh at the moment at all but yeah when we do the Smoothie there is a lot of different sizes and like particle size there’s a whole bunch in there so yeah because there’s a a lot of discussion going on right now especially in North America about kind of infusing some of the foods that go to the coral with different strains of bacteria so that it’s kind of like a you know way of the pp taking it in but uh I’m curious what you think sure yeah I mean there’s a lot of research being done on that on the probiotics and also how they might help cors to become more resilient to stressors I mean people in Saudi Arabia had good results with the fing the corals with the probiotic bacteria and and that made them more resilient so I I’m not I don’t know the the details of that but there’s been studies published so there’s in my view there’s definitely something to it if you have the right type of bacteria I mean we we benefit from Pro probiotic bacteria as well so the or cly would as well it might also be a way to to combat uh pathogenic bacteria right to to bring the microbiome back into into shape or to out compete the um pathogenic bacteria in a way yeah we definitely like the science field is just starting to realize like I we know that the bacteria are really important I me we talk with the coral we talk about a Holo Bion we don’t just talk about the coral like the the animal but we know for a while that the algae are just as important but we also uh we also um see the bacteria as part of this Holo Bond and we’re just starting to figure F out what all the bacteria in the different comp compartments of the coral are doing what their roles are yeah we just know very little so far but it’s definitely very interesting field that uh yeah that I I follow a bit as well and I’m sure like within the next five 10 years we will find out a bunch more and uh we might conclude that we need more of this in our tank well I wonder I mean it might be an Avenue that you guys go down in terms of some product development eventually you know based on where this Farm goes and you know developing a food goes along with your uh your corals you sell or it’s definitely on the agenda to also work in that in that uh yeah area just wanted to see if you had any observations in terms of lighting and schedules and and Peak periods and uh you know things like that so can you tell me like what kind of lighting you’re running and you know a little bit about the photo period sure so in our main facility where basically every day the same we use predominantly the radons mostly the generation 4 which I think were or are yeah my favorite lamps to to be honest the moment but also that the newer Generations we we use as well so the schedules we put together ourselves so usually the photo period is about 12 hours and depending on the on the corals and on the experiments and what is uh what we’re doing the intensity is between can be as low as 80 and can be as high as 500 there’s quite a bit of variation you’re talking up to 500 par yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly and uh so Peak period how long would your sort of peak light period last for and how fast would it get to that as far as ramp up time or the highest or the highest intensity that’s where we had the the ones um that I took to to zo that goes after 3 hours 11 is about 2 hours Peak period where they have close to 500 and then it goes slowly like down in a linear and then Spectrum probably gets more blue towards the end obviously too yeah but it doesn’t change too much to the I don’t do like an actual BL phase at the end yeah okay just ramp Stone basically and how fast would you to Peak period how how much ramp up time um within about three and a half hours okay okay interesting yeah so yeah a bit of a Sil Sil ramp yeah um and in the spawning systems we use the reefbrite um light bar LED bars M um it’s a British uh British manufacturer um I mean that it was built in in England so it’s kind of yeah logical to use a local yeah lighting system so these are nice and uh yeah we have I want say how many power on the top is about 300 depending also they’re not all the same distance to to the water but I say around 300 yeah um and the period is so it ramps up it’s it’s four bars over each tank of the where the mother colonies are in and then there like sequentially um switched on so there’s it’s not like a linear ramping out like one switch is on and then the next and next and so on um so that is after I think we have it at the moment also after four hours that we have to Peak and then that lasts for another four and then it wraps down again I’m surprised that you’re using bars that just come on and off on the spawn this is on the spawning system cuz I would think you I was thinking you would want more like a really gradual curve to the ramp up but I guess it’s more AO period and then to to stick with the when it should be dark it should be dark and when there should be light it there should be light but the whether or not it’s linear it yeah maybe it it might help to optimize things but so far for all purposes it has work the way it has been okay designed so it’s it’s around by the Apex uh computers and then they just sequentially switch on and off okay yeah and I I assume these bars are like a blend of of spectrums like their 50 or something like that yeah okay yeah cool okay well that’s interesting Aqua perfect as a German manufacturer they also do the um LED light bars um that’s the lights we had over our tank at inter um very would say I mean simple sounds a bit derogatory but uh they’re uh without an app so I don’t need the the 408 app on my phone it’s just and the spectrum is good I like those uh quite a lot so we’ve been using those more and more cool okay yeah I kind of like that I like products that are basic like that you know I like things that just can be controlled with an outlet sometimes you know yeah yeah exact but I think that nice things about the radons is that you have all these channels that you can individually program and that is um that’s also something we um want to explore more in terms of how the the coloration of the juvenile corals is um yeah expressing on different Lighting systems yeah yeah setting for that the radons are are fabulous no doubt about that um and I mean one thing I’ve kind of thought about before is that uh like a coral that is at its healthiest to to spawn isn’t always going to correlate with the best coloration at the same time right like would you agree that maybe sometimes a coral that’s like the the you know the most healthy call it fat maybe you know like ready to just produce whatever it needs to might actually be a little bit darker or not quite as appealing visually initially yeah yeah sure so also the aim is to have the mother colonies to be as happy and healthy and strong as possible so also the the feeding uh is yeah very or necessary to allow them to to produce all the eggs and sperm because if you think about the amount of fatty acids and proteins that are being released during the spawning that’s it’s sometimes it’s really insane or large the AA the which we have like 30 kilo sitting in the tank when that one spawned the amount of stuff that came out mind blowing so you definitely want to don’t want to miss it because that that would have formed the system no doubt about that so yeah the amount of energy they put into The Offspring it’s that’s yeah it’s mind blowing yeah and like you say maybe they can’t produce those you know egg and sperm bundles without maybe that’s where those particulate yeah if you have these half staed corals where you really just want to see the the uh very want to have very few symbion and a lot of the the uh neon colors yeah those corals would not give a good result in spawning really not the idea Al yeah our approach is like the the mother colonies they don’t have to be pretty right they are just have to provide genetic variation and The Offspring is uh yeah want to show their their potential basically yeah and in The Offspring you have the whole variety from just dull coloration all the way to the really popping ones but I don’t care if the the Mother Colony is um yeah is a bit more grown or not still give the genetics right if even if the beautiful intense colors are covered by the brown algae they still have it in their jeans so they have still give it to their offspring so that really doesn’t matter what the mother color looks like at the time of spawning it just matters what the genes can do basically yeah and I guess once you guys have uh successful um spawns that you’re raising to cell you’re going to have a system that’s more catering towards pulling out the best coloration uh on those Offspring you know yeah EXA and then also ultimately we continue breeding with our own frot stock basically so we’re not relying on always getting in new um new colonies yeah but to have our own um lines basically yeah yeah and do you plan on I mean espe because originally you’re going to want like a lot of brood stock to kind of pull you know pull from uh are you kind of focused on any specific regions or like you said you had some corals from Fiji but um are you kind of trying to get stuff from all over wherever you can kind of thing like essentially having a bank of corals yeah that that would be awesome of course but uh yeah there there is limitations in terms of space and um also the logistics to get Coral so we currently we have brot stock from Fiji from Australia and from Saudi Arabia um also because they spawn at different times of the year Saudi Arabia spring early summer and then Fiji and in Autumn and or fall and Australia and winter so in the new facilities we also want to look into Indonesian corals also because of the availability um and Australia of course Fiji um yeah and then there’s not that much more uh where you could Source them from well I mean I guess your other way is sourcing them from fragmentation in the hobby too because obviously Germany’s got a lot of great hobbyists and yeah that is also something that that that works well if you get big colonies that are um yeah happy and stable you introduce them to a climate simulated system it will take a a bit of time it might be a year might be one and a half years but once it’s clocked into the um seasonal schedule it will spawn at the at the time when that species spawns that’s also what happened our corop aera um that is in our Australian system but we got it from a museum um the museum in in Kore um so originally it probably is also from from Indonesia yeah but it clocked into the Australian cycle and after one and a half years it yeah interesting yeah that’s definitely we definitely in like midterm we definitely want to completely get away from importing new corals so that is definitely our goal so we want to totally get keep it as as minimal right now we already very little uh like because usually very few of the mother colonies die off so we can use them again and again of course so um but every now and then of course we need a bit of a new uh gene pool in there but um on the long run we don’t we don’t want to continue that and yeah yeah so you might commit to a date where you’re like okay no more imported corals were doing this 100% off you know Off the Grid basically yeah yeah it’s cool well I that’s really exciting for kind of the future of the Hobby and and you guys are definitely pioneering a lot of that so that’s super cool um yeah I can’t wait to see what you guys do in the next you know five 10 years it sounds like you’re you know pretty committed to it so it should be really cool yeah yeah so there’s no turning back now there’s no turning back and then hopefully we’ll get a way to uh ship some of these you know if we can get some of these uh fully aquacultured corals specified differently maybe the SES and the importation into different countries will be made a a little more easy too country country of origin is will be Germany then yeah because they are those will be the first German for yeah and last time I checked there was no tropical reefs in Germany [Laughter] so cool was there anything else you guys wanted to mention I feel like we uh we covered a lot here actually um think we got no maybe just if anybody is interested to have a look at our facility um Toby from SE friendly Reef uh visitors us a couple of times and already did a bunch of videos in our um facility at the University it is on his channel SE friendly reef and also on the Tropic Marin Channel um yeah so I’ll put I’ll put links to I I did I did see the SE friendly Reef tour and it was pretty awesome so I’ll put that in the description notes yeah and there is there is a couple of English videos also on the Tropic Marin Channel about the facility I’m pretty sure yeah that’s the one I watched OB so yeah yeah and then yeah maybe if you link our Instagram so we just started our Instagram so people can follow us and see how we build our new facility and what calls we’re growing and yeah how how everything is developing totally yeah you guys deserve more followers so we’ll uh we’ll push that and uh um yeah awesome okay well thanks so much for making time guys I uh appreciate talking to you and uh maybe we’ll do a followup at some point and see what you’re up to in a in in a couple years or whatever I’m I’m going to keep doing this as long as I’m enjoying it too so you know awesome okay thanks for your interest thanks for having us so much for having us on yeah okay I appreciate it guys we’ll keep in touch okay have a good night okay bye take care bye bye bye thanks for joining me on this episode of Beyond The Reef with Sam and Marine if you want to dig a little deeper into the research they’re doing for the ICBM program at the oldenberg University I will leave links to the website and some of the other videos and social media we talked about associated with them in the show description below just another shout out to our SP sponsor funa Marine definitely check out some of their new exciting products that they brought to the market this year if you have any suggestions for future guest want to ask me a question or just reach out in general you can email me at Beyond thepod gmail.com and if you’re looking for high-quality aquacultured Corals in Canada please go to my website at fragg garage.ca hope to hear from you soon
7 Comments
Woohoo! BTR is my #1 reefing content. Fauna is all I've bought for the last year, their products are consistently high quality, and even better, they work. Looking forward to this discussion. EDIT: this is fascinating
Nobody else floored with the idea of hybrid acros? This was eye opening and I can't wait to see what those 2 do in the next few years.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Those two are amazing and their knowledge will be helpful to the industry as a whole!
Been listening for quite a while now on Spotify.. just wanna say what an AMAZING podcast. Loving the coral breeding stuff especially 👍🇦🇺
oooo sponsored by Fauna Marin…. Whats his face just slapped a bunch of customers on the Canadian side by this retardation with Exotic/Bigshowfrags and ICPs and other products from "unauthorized resellers". Had a number of ICPs just get declined because it is not authentic? GTFO FM.
Where can I get the echinata in the background of the thumbnail. Man do I miss the old days