Tankraised, tank bred, captivebred?

[kalkbreath]

I could use some help from the club.
I need to set the standards straight with all this cultivated jargon.
Whats your definition of 100 percent captive grown coral?Multiple generations of cultivating. i.e; the mother colony was tank bred and frags of her were again propagated and grown out for sale.
If all of the coral's/frag's tissue growth has taken place inside an artificial system.
What one or two word phrase like "tank raised" "tank bred" would best make this culture product clear to the hobbyist?

I have a few other products which I am re-naming to better make the corals origin understood; like replacing Maricultured with "Ocean Cultured" to explain that the coral was farmed/grown on artifical plugs in the ocean/lagoon.

"Aquarium Cultured" to be used when a wild mother colony is fragmented and the frags are mounted and grown out under captive artificial aquarium reef conditions.

I think possible options like "Domesticated corals "might work?

these corals have not only adapted to captive artificial aquarium conditions, But these corals have proven track records of thriving in captivity.

I think this unique product deserves its own catagory.

Yet we still lump these tried and true corals in with the rest of raised , cultivated , bred lingo.

Currently many commercial products from trade name organizations like ORA hobbyists think of as "tank bred and fully acclimated to aquarium life, are actually grown under sunlight and in natural ocean water?
Wild corals are grown under sunlight and natural seawater, how is the product ready for aquariums when its grown in wild conditions?

Anyhow, I say its time to revamp the lingo associated with growing corals.
Who's with me and whats your thoughts?
Thanks Jeff CBA

 

[piznac]

Noob here,.. but wouldn't aquacultured work? I would assume literaly that would mean water raised?.. But I've always associated that with fraged corals or with corals that were taken off the reefs but were then raised and fragged in an aquarium. Prehaps Im wrong,. again noob here

 

[broreefr]

Does that mean the Corals at the store are going to be "Re-named" ?

 

[kalkbreath]

Yes, we will be using these new more meaningful terms and phrases to explain a corals origin inside the store.
But the main use for these new phrases of cultured products, is the explain the differences between each product on our new online store.


In order to understand the hidden value in a product type , a hobbyists must understand how a corals origin can determine its extra value.
Some examples of how an animals origin can affect its value are:

1.)xenia from the wild rarely thrive in captive conditions, yet captive raised or "domesticated"xenia seem to grow like weeds and thrive in an Aquarium.
When you see xenia for sale in an LFS , the cultured xenia is a better, more likely to thrive product.
One way to think of this hidden value in domesticated products is that its kinda like Domesticated corals have a better extended guarantee.
If a domesticated coral has survived in captivity for five generations for years , the chances of it freaking out when you buy it and put it into an new aquarium are far less likely then a wild coral which was out on the pristine reefs a week prior.

Dogs and Cats are a purr fect example of how domestication can take an animal unfit for domestic life like a wolf, and through generations of captive breeding ....end up with a better product.

Jeff

 

[maveri9720]

How about Captive Raised Corals?

 

[FutureInterest]

I like your idea.

If you're trying to create a new distinction here, then I think "domesticated corals" will work. Noone else uses that terminology in conjunction with corals and to me it stands out as a coral that has been enslaved and proven to thrive under our inadequate care. Perhaps you can put "Made in the USA" stickers on them?

 

[broreefr]

Perhaps I am being too negative here but hearing words like "renamed" and phrases like "hidden value", and "extra value" from a dealer. It makes me wonder if an associated price increase is going to be passed on to the buyer.

Jeff you posted this and asked for opinions, I, and I think most club members here adore your store, good merchandise at a "semi-fair" price. I personally have been in on numerous occasions and will shop there in the future.

I would be more pleased if the store would focus on honoring the agreed opon 10% discount for ARC members. I was given it one time on a very pricey skimmer, each and every time after, I was given a different reason as to why it could not be given, ie. "that's a special buy, there on sale already,that price is already rock bottom, a couple months ago I was told "we dont give discounts on Acros, especially one that big,"

In order not to feel funny at the register, I just have stopped asking.

As you said in your original post "Who's with me and whats your thoughts?"

My thoughts are that we are about to see a price increase. :unsure:

 

[jmaneyapanda]

I am a bit of a scientific terminology snob. I am on your side that the jargon involved with aquacultrued, maricultured, wild, etc. is quite blurred. More on this- what is a "pair of fish"? Mated pair, male/female, just two fish?

At any rate- I dont feel domestication is the correct term at all. Domesticated animals have change form and function. A yellow lab is a domesticated wolf- two totally different animals- both physically and functionally. A cat a domesticated leopard- same story. The coral we may propogate are not as such- they are the same form (to a certain extent), the same physiology, the same biology. I understand that our corals may have adapted to our aquarium conditions better than ones fresh from the ocean, but this makes them no more domesticated than the tiger that thrives in the zoo.

To take this to another level, how is any coral not wild collected? The exception to this comment would be corals that have sexually reproduced in the aquarium (of which the list is very short). But otherwise, the asexual reproduction througn fragging, polyp bailout, fission, whatever, is still the same colonial organism taken from the ocean. How many generations of splitting is required before it is called aquacultured or whatever?

To me the most obvious and clear cut term is "Aquarium grown". I know I argue a lot of semantics, but I donyt feel domesticated is at all the correct term.

 

[kevin]

I feel that clarification can help the new or experienced hobbyist to make a more educated decision of which animals to purchase and why. We all know that some animals cannot be "bred" or propogated successfully in aquaria, even though we have had a lot of success with other species.

I feel that Acquaculured Coral means that the mother colony was removed from the wild for a short period of time, some parts fragmented off of it, and the colony is returned to its original place in the ocean (this can be a very difficult feat to accomplish).

After some of these frags grow into mother colonies, then they can be fragged as well, leaving the original mother colony alone in the ocean to thrive. This will enable these specimens to endure more stresses that are associated with captive care.

You bring up the example of Xenia being hard to keep if it is removed from the ocean, however it spreads like a weed if propogated in our tanks... I feel that Softies are a great example of this, including all leathers. These animals can be fragged easily and the mother colony will recover quickly as well.

Most of the people on this forum and in this club are all for Saving our Reefs through the educaiton of the public and therefore saving the hobby as well.

I feel that better descriptions of how these animals came to be in your store will help individuals make more sustainable choices in the future. No one here wants to see an animal be sold to an individual who cannot care for it and eventually see the animal die :bash2:

Research is an important aspect of keeping these animals healthy, but every person here has made at least one impulse decision saying, "ooh, that looks cool" and the animal may not survive.

I wish every LFS took the time to educate the public about how these animals were aquired.

Thank you!

Now for the plug... if anyone would like to know more about sustainable choices both in fish we eat and animals we choose for our tanks, please think of attending SaltwaterU May 5-6, 2007 at the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta. We are planning a GREAT weekend.

 

[melissa]

jmaneyapanda wrote: I am a bit of a scientific terminology snob. I am on your side that the jargon involved with aquacultrued, maricultured, wild, etc. is quite blurred. More on this- what is a "pair of fish"? Mated pair, male/female, just two fish?

At any rate- I dont feel domestication is the correct term at all. Domesticated animals have change form and function. A yellow lab is a domesticated wolf- two totally different animals- both physically and functionally. A cat a domesticated leopard- same story. The coral we may propogate are not as such- they are the same form (to a certain extent), the same physiology, the same biology. I understand that our corals may have adapted to our aquarium conditions better than ones fresh from the ocean, but this makes them no more domesticated than the tiger that thrives in the zoo.

To take this to another level, how is any coral not wild collected? The exception to this comment would be corals that have sexually reproduced in the aquarium (of which the list is very short). But otherwise, the asexual reproduction througn fragging, polyp bailout, fission, whatever, is still the same colonial organism taken from the ocean. How many generations of splitting is required before it is called aquacultured or whatever?

To me the most obvious and clear cut term is "Aquarium grown". I know I argue a lot of semantics, but I donyt feel domesticated is at all the correct term.

Bingo - exactly what I was thinking, but you said it better. Domesticated is not an appropriate word to use in this hobby. Maybe a few hundred years down the road we could consider some corals "domesticated".

 

[kalkbreath]

I understand the resistance to adopt terms from other sciences.
But we seem to be the founding fathers of coral culturing.
There are no correct terms as of yet.
Disagreements within even established scientific circles many dont even agree that cats have been truely tamed or domesticated.
But elephants in India have been? Due to differences in behavioral modifications. Domestic house cats still act like wild cats, yet Worker elephants in India seem to have completely become tamed
The truth is that this hobby needs to come up with terms and phrases which accurately convey the origins of our cultivated corals.

Other wise there is no incentive to culture cultivators which yield better survivability morphs.
Without clear distinctions, a wild xenia which was fragged five minutes earlier is considered an equal with a ten year captive strain of xenia whose off spring was carefully propagated and grown out under captive conditions?
Even the Mariculture or now more properly renamed "Ocean Cultured" corals which come mounted on artificial plugs......come from two very different backgrounds.
Indonesian ocean cultured corals come from re-cultured mother colonies, while Pacific islanders like Tonga Fiji collect the donor frags directly off the wild reefs.( just like seen in Walts presentation at Salt water U)
Are these two products the same?
Yet we as a hobby call both mariculture.
Another confusion is how the grow out conditions play a vital role in the products adaptability to captive conditions: If two corals come from the same mother colony, one is grown in sunlight and the other is grown under artificial aquarium light.
Would these two "cultured"products be considered equally adapted to aquarium life?
How about the same two corals , yet one is now grown in natural seawater and the other is grown in Instant Ocean.
Would these two corals be equally acclimated to aquarium life?
Hardly.
Without clearer lingo, all these vastly different products get lumped into one
homogenate phrase:
.................................................. Cultured.

 

[jmaneyapanda]

Kalkbreath wrote: I understand the resistance to adopt terms from other sciences.
But we seem to be the founding fathers of coral culturing.
There are no correct terms as of yet.
Disagreements within even established scientific circles many dont even agree that cats have been truely tamed or domesticated.
But elephants in India have been? Due to differences in behavioral modifications. Domestic house cats still act like wild cats, yet Worker elephants in India seem to have completely become tamed
The truth is that this hobby needs to come up with terms and phrases which accurately convey the origins of our cultivated corals.

Other wise there is no incentive to culture cultivators which yield better survivability morphs.
Without clear distinctions, a wild xenia which was fragged five minutes earlier is considered an equal with a ten year captive strain of xenia whose off spring was carefully propagated and grown out under captive conditions?
Even the Mariculture or now more properly renamed "Ocean Cultured" corals which come mounted on artificial plugs......come from two very different backgrounds.
Indonesian ocean cultured corals come from re-cultured mother colonies, while Pacific islanders like Tonga Fiji collect the donor frags directly off the wild reefs.( just like seen in Walts presentation at Salt water U)
Are these two products the same?
Yet we as a hobby call both mariculture.
Another confusion is how the grow out conditions play a vital role in the products adaptability to captive conditions: If two corals come from the same mother colony, one is grown in sunlight and the other is grown under artificial aquarium light.
Would these two "cultured"products be considered equally adapted to aquarium life?
How about the same two corals , yet one is now grown in natural seawater and the other is grown in Instant Ocean.
Would these two corals be equally acclimated to aquarium life?
Hardly.
Without clearer lingo, all these vastly different products get lumped into one
homogenate phrase:
.................................................. Cultured.

Yes, I agree with some points. Without some standard to call a coral "aquacultured" in regards to duration in captivity, this cannot be resolved though. Is it F1, F2, F10, F1000 generations that are called "Aquacultured"? We can't have a lingo until this is defined by whoever- heck- maybe you!

I still think you are off with your domestication context, though. Make no mistakes, elephants are ALWAYS con sidered wild, there is no domesticated elephants. The ones you see that are "tamed", are just accustomed to human involvement, but are in no way domestic. That, in particular, was a bad example in my mind- elephants are one of the deadliest wild animals in captivity nowadays. Many people are killed by such "tamed" elephants every year around the world. I also happen to know what goes into "taming:" an elephant, and it in NO WAY WHATSOEVER is anywhere near domestication. Without getting way off topic, I'll leave it at that. If you want to know more of what I'm talking about, PM me.

Getting back to corals, though- perhaps the best way to proclaim the "aquacultured-ness" of such corals is to flat out name the distance from wild. For example- 10th genration captive xenia, or F5 acropora Yongei, or whatever. But again, this begs the question, how do you determine what is a generation in organisms that repoduce asexually? Perhaps the solution is for a Proclamation of age in captivity- for example- frag of XXX from colony 8 years captive, or whatever. I dont know how else to place an empirical label to such a interpretive topic, especially without a agreement and consensus from the hobby as a whole.

 

[dakota]

Personally, I like Drs. Foster and Smith's "Certified Captive-Grown Corals" program. They supply a certificate of authenticity, and increase their guarantee to 30 days from the date of delivery. Nice idea.

Unless the new description also included something along those lines, I'd think it was just a way to play up corals that local reefers brought in for a trade or store credit. I usually prefer those corals anyway and have many interesting and healthy corals that I purchased this way, and the price was always very reasonable, too.

I'd like to see an "Atanta Reef Club Member Grown" appellation. I'd buy those corals over any others, because I'd know they came out of a local tank that was well kept.

As for all the other lingo.... piffff. I'll take it with a grain of salt.

Who is doing the certification / inspection / policing???

 

[kalkbreath]

Dakota wrote: Personally, I like Drs. Foster and Smith's "Certified Captive-Grown Corals" program. They supply a certificate of authenticity, and increase their guarantee to 30 days from the date of delivery. Nice idea.

Are you aware that the example above is from a wild mother colony?
"certified captive grown" means what?
If taking a wild sps from Tonga or Fiji, then break it into tips to grow out on a floral pin is captive raised. Then what would you call it if the mother colony was not from the wild?
or what if the mother colony was an Ocean cultured colony?
What if the mother colony was a ten year in captivity broodstock?
Even a wild coral which has been at the LFS for a few weeks and has grown in size a bit would qualify as "Captive grown" .
Or even a small wild yellow tang which grows in size at an LFS , would this fish not be deemed Captive grown?
I would like to do better.

 

[broreefr]

Kalkbreath wrote: Even a wild coral which has been at the LFS for a few weeks and has grown in size a bit would qualify as "Captive grown" .
Or even a small wild yellow tang which grows in size at an LFS , would this fish not be deemed Captive grown?
I would like to do better.

If the Coral or the fish is growing, it more than likely has adapted to captive conditions, ie. water flow, artificial water, and lighting. Other than that the main concern would be with ocean parisites in your tank.

If the coral is growing and has adapted ~ How are you going to do better?

and are you gong to be taking positive steps to honor the club discount ??

 

[kalkbreath]

This is from WIKIPEIA

To be considered domesticated, a population of animals must have their behavior, life cycle, or physiology systemically altered as a result of being under humans control for many generations. (Please see the main article on domestication for more information.) Animals included in this list that do not fully meet this criterion are designated "captive-bred" or semi-domesticated. The term domestic animal applies to domesticated animals that actually live in physical proximity to humans, such as pets and guard animals, or even food species kept very close, e.g. to live on domestic food scraps and/or so their body heat can be used as 'stable heating'.

I would say that " have their behavior, life cycle, or physiology systemically altered as a result of being under humans control " would qualify Captive corals as Domesticated. Corals which under artificial light and synthetic seawater are physiology different from their wild counterparts.
I wonder if captive xenia would even survive in the wild ? or would it melt?

 

[kalkbreath]

Broreefr wrote: If the Coral or the fish is growing, it more than likely has adapted to captive conditions, ie. water flow, artificial water, and lighting. Other than that the main concern would be with ocean parisites in your tank.

If the coral is growing and has adapted ~ How are you going to do better?

and are you gong to be taking positive steps to honor the club discount ??

But how much must a coral or fish grow in order for it now to be deemed Captive cultured? One week ? One day ?
How much growth ? one percent? Ten percent.
When can we crown it captive adapted? Five minutes after its placed inside the aquarium does the coral or fish earn captive points for every minute it survives tank hood?

lumping all the durations of time into one phrase; "captive"
would mean every thing is captive raised after its dumped into an aquarium.

 

[reefscape]

and are you gong to be taking positive steps to honor the club discount ??...he did ever reply to this question....what good is it to join the club..an get the run around about the discount ...an this is not the only store...that has given the run around about it....carried my paypal print out to marine fish ...an was told it was no good the need the card....starting to think i wasted 30 dollars...i love the arc site but i spent the money ...to save money ...an have seen no savings this far...just alot of double talk...sorry for maybe being off topic...its just paid the money ..for the discounts

 

[kalkbreath]

Broreefr wrote: If the Coral or the fish is growing, it more than likely has adapted to captive conditions, ie. water flow, artificial water, and lighting. Other than that the main concern would be with ocean parisites in your tank.

If the coral is growing and has adapted ~ How are you going to do better?

and are you gong to be taking positive steps to honor the club discount ??

As for club discounts, As a in store customer, you can choose to apply one of four discount routes.
1.) apply your club discount to the regular in store price.

2.) you can take advantage of current in store sale prices.

3.) You can order on the web and take advantage of online specials. (min order applies) and you can apply your ARC discount if you pick up your order at the store.

4.) you can ask for a price match to that of another vendor.
( price matching if agreed to by CBA, is the final price. no additional discounts will apply.)

If you or any other member feels our store policy was not applied to you correctly , please feel free to voice your concerns to me at mailto:Jeff@cappuccinobaylive.com">Jeff@cappuccinobaylive.com</a>

Hope that clears things up ,
Jeff CBA

 

[FutureInterest]

I don't think this is the right forum to be complaining about your arc discount... and its most definately not the topic of this thread. If you're having problems then talk to the arc board.