Please introduce yourself to the reader, including your industry experience and favorite sea creature.
My name is Juno; I’m an aquarist and salesperson at the Monsoon Aquatics Bundaberg branch.
As an aquarist, I was able to learn all sorts of husbandry and hatchery techniques utilized on systems at a much larger scale. Maintaining larger systems is quite different from maintaining a home system.
I have also honed fragging skills which started from pulling rarer corals aside for safe keep during boat unloads, to now to having a program production of over 2,000 frags per week and looking after more than 60,000 growing around the facility which we then sell to both domestic and export market.
My highlight here will always be being involved in the coral spawning programs. I was fortunate to experience my first Scolymia and other species spawning back in 2021. Witnessing the settlement, grow out, and finally release on the market. This next evolution from fragging to spawning has been spectacular.
It’s been an amazing experience learning and being a part of the process of getting corals from the ocean or our labs to the end user hobbyist’s hands.
This is currently my 4th year here and my focus is more so on my role as a salesperson, having good relationship with clients and meeting new people, understanding the market trends worldwide has brought me a lot of insight and understanding to the industry.
My favorite sea creature is a tie between the sea Angle Gymnosomata and the little lumpsucker fish Eumicrotremus pacificus, known as “Dangouo,” which lives in the cold waters of Japan! (drawings ->)
What got you into the hobby, and what aspects of that original motivation are found in your work today?
I was heavily influenced by my parents from a young age, watching them keep tropical aquariums at home, visiting the famous Goldfish Street in Hong Kong together on Sundays, and their love for diving on different reefs whenever we had a chance to go as a family during summer vacations. All these things inspired me to want to learn more about the underwater world and to pursue marine studies and aquaculture later in life. I started keeping a marine aquarium as soon as I had the chance to.
What is your day-to-day life on the farm, and what are your core responsibilities?
My current focus is on sales, so my day involves looking through all the corals for a quick health check, determining availability, what needs added production to meet the month’s demands, what stock I might need from our other facility, populate our stock list, and liaise with clients, helping them build orders that suit their market trends. Most recently, we have also started selling our captive-bred coral babies, which adds an exciting section to our stock list when promoting our range.
My other focuses are product development, marketing, and socials.
From my understanding, Monsoon Aquatics does both aquacultures and will also export wild colonies globally. What pieces do you all decide/focus on the farm, and which do you prefer to ship from the get-go?
As an Australian exporter we have species unique to our reefs so naturally those were our main focused from the get go as it made us different to what was already readily available on the export import market. The Scolys, Micromussa lords, Bowerbankis etc.
Aside from that, we also focus on our client group and what works for them for that season.
How does Monsoon Aquatics ensure that collection/farming practices are sustainable and friendly?
Everything we collect is done by hand. The divers have a huge area available to them that they can collect from, the size of 26,000 Sydney Harbours actually! Although they do have favorite spots for certain corals, so they really look after those spots to make sure they can keep going back to them time and time again. It’s really not in our favor to over-collect from any area. There are also strict quota limits in place, down to the species level, for certain things. Every piece of coral we collect gets weighed and reported to Fisheries. You must have a license to collect in each region, and we hold licenses for Queensland, Northern Territory, Western Australia, and the Coral Sea.
In terms of farming we are really fortunate that we have a 5km pipeline direct from the ocean to our facility for saltwater. We also have the biggest solar system that will fit on our roof to offset electricity usage. We have come up with a modular paddlewheel tank that dramatically reduces electricity usage but still gets great flow. And we have a greenhouse, so we can use the sun instead of LEDs! We are constantly trying out ways to improve.
Monsoon has also been selling a lot of spawned pieces lately – how does coral spawning play with the wild and aquaculture operations – does each category have it’s own dedicated systems?
Our spawned corals are all grown in their own early grow out systems in the lab area until they are at least 1 year old, isolated from all our other general stock.
Once they have been determined ready to be sold through appropriate size/age, they are then moved out and go into our baby raceway in the general stock systems.
This practice minimizes the chances of cross contaminating those systems in the lab area via our hands or equipment, such as generally system water which may contain pests and spores.
What’s the process of shipping corals overseas? What does it look like to comply with CITES regulations? How do you minimize shipping stress for the corals?
It’s complicated! Once we pack a box, we basically have 72 hours to get it where it is going. Everything travels in the belly of commuter planes, and we spend a lot of time making sure all the flights line up. I flew to Los Angeles last year, and we actually had one of our shipments traveling on the same plane! In terms of CITES regulations, every single hard coral we ship must be declared on CITES, plus any large pieces of dead coral skeleton that soft corals are attached to. We must label the contents of each box with the species packed in there, and then we must attach the SER (species export record) for CITES to that whole shipment. We must acquit each SER within 2 weeks of sending the shipment, which basically means reporting what was sent to the CITES Management Authority. We have a lot of checks and balances in place to make sure we get it right. It’s also really important we get our packing right to minimize stress on the corals. We have designed and built our own packing stations and have our bags especially made for us – we have over 20 different sizes of bags we use! We make sure the water quality is exactly right, and if anything isn’t looking 100% in our tanks, it doesn’t get sent. Our pack crews also work crazy hours, often starting at 2 am, to ensure boxes are packed as close to airport loading time as possible.
Have consumer trends affected collection for you all? For instance when goni’s became popular did you all feel that increase in demand?
Luckily, with a big fleet covering a large area of the reefs, we are able to choose and specify with our skippers what we want collected most from every trip. We definitely adjust the amounts of species collected according to different customer’s market trends. For example, we noticed the blasto trend from last year domestically, so we requested divers go far and wide and collect anything they see out of the ordinary, allowing us to produce an expanded signature range.
Do you all use natural seawater? If so what steps does it go through before it’s utilize in the systems – if you use artificial sea water could you walk readers through how you all keep up with demand for alk, calcium etc with such high coral density.
We do use natural sea water at both our Bundaberg and Cairns facility. A good water supply helps us facilitate all our densely stocked systems, also enables us to maintain large-scale aquaculture projects.
At the Bundaberg facility, we have been lucky enough to supply the sheds with over 20,000L of fresh salt water every day. Saltwater is pumped from a pipeline that extends half a kilometer out into the ocean, which is then brought into our 120,000 open settlement pond. Once the sediment has cleared, water is transferred into our 150,000L closed storage allowing us to treat and optimize. The storage system will have a recirculation pump to maintain water movement and prevent stagnation; the pump is linked to mechanical filtration down to 25micron (or even smaller if required) key parameters such as kH, salinity, PH, etc., will be monitored, and adjusted continually to ensure the water has the chemistry we want before it hits our systems.
What are the biggest hurdles Monsoon faces in terms of coral health, day-to-day operations, etc
Keeping up with the demand of stock especially in fish. Expanding and building new systems while we run our day-to-day operations.
The management of pests and corals coming in from different regions of Australia. With corals coming in from all regions of Australia, we must be experienced in identifying pests and knowing how to eliminate them. Once corals are removed from the reefs, our crew and a small selection of snails and shells become the sole carers of these creatures. So, knowing what dips and procedures to use once pests are identified is crucial to keeping coral thriving long-term.
Another challenge would be the management and upkeep of various devices and software across multiple systems and sheds.
Everything is monitored by different automated testing systems that check the stability of temperature, pH, salinity, and the big three (calcium, alkalinity, and magnesium). Other life support equipment, such as pumps, chillers, and lights, are needed to ensure they are all functioning correctly.
It is fundamental for our staff to maintain control and upkeep of these computers, especially in a high humidity environment, to make sure they are all well calibrated and on standby.