We’ve been very vocal advocates of local fish stores in our writing, the Reef Therapy Podcast, and countless aquarium shop tours throughout the years. This past holiday shopping weekend we didn’t just talk about supporting these important retail establishments but we put our money where our mouth is to the tune of around $2000 at 15 different stores spread across the greater Denver area and boy did we score some very nice goodies.
You’d be forgiven for believing that ‘prices are too high’ and that the selection of live corals is pretty limited but this sentiment is the result of looking through an internet shaped keyhole. No single vendor, either online or in real life, has a monopoly on great desirable corals which is why we spent two full days seeing what our local Denver reef store scene has to offer.
We couldn’t have been more thrilled about how this year’s #LFSsaturday turned out because our effort was rewarded with plenty of deals, and lots of fun, weird corals that we’ve wanted to add to our collection for a number of years. We surely spotted plenty of underpriced, overlooked frags that just needed some TLC and time but the biggest scores came from ‘used corals’, large frags that were recently traded in as well as some show specimens recently harvested from tank tear downs.
We understand that not everyone lives in an area blessed with many LFS but we stand with our frontline retail comrades that brick and mortar aquarium and fish stores are an important cornerstone of local reef aquarium communities. We didn’t intend to spend as much as we did but with so many nice, large, and oddball corals on offer we just had to dip into our coral acquisition budget for next year.
It would have taken us out of the ‘coral shopping zone’ to film at every location but hopefully this video recap of nearly everything we got is the next best thing. We couldn’t be more thrilled with how the LFS crawl turned out and we’ll be spending most of the weekend looking after and curating all the fun new pieces of coral that have joined the collection at the Reef Builders Studio.
