If you’re into corals you must be into coral spawning and its potential for the hobby and the world at large. In this week’s episode of the Reef Therapy podcast, Remy and Salem talk to Don and Lu from Inter-Fish in Australia.
Inter-Fish is a coral collector turned coral spawning facility that first spawned corals by accident one night in 2020 when hammer corals spawned in their holding systems. Dr. Lu is by his own admittance obsessed with breeding marine life. After previously breeding and raising Mandarins he looked to Don and said we should be trying to raise corals too, and four years later they’ve captive spawned and raised many species of LPS corals from hammers to frogspawns, trachys, acans, dipsastrea, gonis and more.
In this episode, Don and Lu tell us how they get corals to spawn, we learn that different corals spawn at different times of the year, as well the challenges the home hobbyist would have trying it in their home tanks. For Inter-Fish the biggest challenges were settlement onto tiles, competition with algae and copepods as well as how to try to clean the tiles, followed by the first three-month period post settlement.
Chimeras
Lu talks about the Chimera gonis he’s created and how “easy” it can be to do it in a small space versus the vastness of the ocean, and asks the question what happens to create master scolies? Are they one-half UFO and one-half Bleeding Apple? Do you have to spawn Master to Master? And if you do, does a Master spawn also create Bleeding Apple and UFO? That’s something he’s working on right now.
Availability
The obvious question is if these amazingly colored spawned corals are available outside of Australia, and Don addresses the legislation and challenges they face on the provenance of captivated spawned corals as well as wild collected. But the best news? Are captive-spawned and raised corals hardier? The answer is Yes, even Goniopora are hardier according to Inter-Fish, so that’s a great thing for the hobby too.
Please watch, listen, and subscribe to this interview with a company at the forefront of coral spawning.
