The two biggest reef shows of the summer, ReefStock Australia and MACNA, have come and gone and while we’re almost caught up on all the products from MACNA, we still have a lot to tell you about ReefStock Australia. Although this was ‘only’ the second year of ReefStock taking place in Sydney Australia, the vendors and exhibitors learned a lot from last year’s inaugural event.
Notably the coral collectors of Australia and the reef stores and fraggers from all over the country brought out a stupefying amount of corals. Furthermore the quality and rarity of these native Australian corals really impressed us with different strains and color morphs we’ve never seen before anywhere.
The orange-tip-green-tentacle-black-mouth hammer coral from Salty Pets was the talk of the show – as it should be for $2500. Salty also had a wicked orange Scolymia which wasn’t the only one at ReefStock, but it was ridonkulously bright. Oceans Reefs Marine Aquariums dominated the torch coral game with orange-tip-green morphs, a deep brown variety with bright orange and green tips, and more yellow and orange tip elegance corals than you can shake a stick at.
Nick’s presentation of scolies and huge gold torches was a sight to behold, so was Gallery Aquatica’s immaculately organized frags, Reef River Reptile brought so much variety, and Franky’s Frags had an eclectic assortment of frags as well. The farmed corals from Sustainable Reefs and Batavia coral farms were even better than last year, and the fresh corals from Ultra Corals, Monsoon, Swell and Cairns Marine gave us a taste of what these companies offer.
The displays by Eastwood Aquariums, Reef River Reptile, Reef Secrets, Aquariums at Asquith and all the shops combined really help to make ReefStock Australia a veritable smorgasbord of the best Australian corals we’ve seen anywhere! We’re very proud of how ReefStock ‘South’ turned out this year, check out our own video of the corals that caught our eyes the most but if you want even more, the Aussie YouTubers also did some heavy lifting in covering so much of the vent that we put together all the videos we could find into one easy to binge playlist.
