Eddie, a high end coral exporter in Indonesia, shares his coral hunting adventures with the world on his blog, My Coral Adventures.  In this series, TRT takes a glimpse at what Eddie has to go through to get proper livestock to good customers. When we last left Eddie, he was taking and incredibly interesting aquacultured coral hunting trip in Northern Bali...

Here's Part 5...

Eddie, a high end coral exporter in Indonesia, shares his coral hunting adventures with the world on his blog, My Coral Adventures.  In this series, TRT takes a glimpse at what Eddie has to go through to get proper livestock to good customers. When we last left Eddie, he was taking and incredibly interesting aquacultured coral hunting trip in Northern Bali...

Here's Part 4...

But the dang walkways were the same – not too safe!  

It was a story that could very easily have been written as science fiction. Gorgonian (sea fan) corals of the Florida coast were turning black and dying. The infectious culprit was something no one working on the reefs had encountered before. It was totally alien. The black rot spread across the Caribbean, decimating coral populations. By the time the contagion had been deduced, more than 50% of total sea fan tissue had been eradicated in the Florida Keys. It was one of the worst coral epidemics in recent history.

The culprit was indeed an alien, though certainly not extra-terrestrial. In fact, it was very terrestrial. Aspergillus sydowii, a globally distributed saprophytic soil fungus was the nightmare creature. Aspergillus causes a variety of diseases in humans and birds, but had not previously been recognized as a marine pathogen.

What's a holobiont? The term was recently coined by a coral researcher to describe his favorite organism. Holo implies something whole but including numerous parts, as in a holistic approach. Biont sounds like something alive. The coral holobiont is the entire community of living organisms that make up a healthy coral head. There is the coral animal itself, an invertebrate with a simple body plan called a polyp. A polyp is a sack, only a few millimeters in diameter. The bottom of the sack is attached to the substrate, and the coral's tentacles extend from the open end. A coral "head" is made up of thousands of these polyps.  

Another familiar part of the coral holobiont is the internal farm—the algae that live as symbionts inside the cells of the coral (the zooxanthellae). The sugars that they produce by photosynthesis are an essential part of the diet of the coral. (link to the earlier post?) Coral reefs have made headline news in recent years as climate change has brought warmer sea surface temperatures. An increase of only a degree or two above the normal summer maximum can cause the coral to lose its symbionts. This is referred to as "bleaching" because, without the pigmented algae, the white skeleton shows through the transparent coral polyps. Bleaching is bad news for corals. Without their farm, they don't get enough nourishment to reproduce or to build their skeleton fast enough to stay ahead of erosion.   

Eddie is a high end coral exporter in Indonesia and has his own blog, My Coral Adventures, to share his coral hunting adventures with the world as he takes trips to find high end livestock for good customers. When we last left Eddie, he was taking and incredibly interesting aquacultured coral hunting trip in Northern Bali...

And now for Part 3...

Back when the natural world could be neatly divided into plants and animals, the corals were a source of puzzlement. Like the related sea anemones, these animals look more like plants. What are they? In the 1700s, the great Swedish botanist and founder of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, dodged the question by classifying them in a group called Zoophyta (animal plants). Truth is, they are both.

By that I mean that the coral animal hosts algae that live inside its cells. (The technical term for this sort of mutual arrangement is endosymbiosis.) These microscopic, single-celled algae gave up their free-living lifestyle in exchange for accommodations provided by the coral. Algae aren't exactly plants, but like plants they contain chloroplasts and carry out photosynthesis. Being microscopic, they fall into that catch-all category—microbes. They are the zooxanthellae, their name coming from the Latin for animal-yellow-small.

Eddie is a high end coral exporter in Indonesia and has his own blog, My Coral Adventures, to share his coral hunting adventures with the world as he takes trips to find high end livestock for good customers. When we last left Eddie, he was taking and incredibly interesting aquacultured coral hunting trip in Northern Bali...

And now for Part 2...

Our first stop is this old delapitated fish grow out station.  It is used as a base for aquaculturing certain species of acros.

I am delighted to share my knowledge and behind the scenes of the aquarium trade.  As hobbyists, the activites of how fish and coral end up in our LFS is a bit of a mystery.  We all know that wholesalers sell to retailers, but how does it get to the wholesalers?  I currently work in Indonesia as a high end coral exporter.  I also run my own blog to share my adventures as I island hop for the high end livestock for my customers.  Through my blog you will be able to follow me as I get corals from suppliers, sometimes directly from fishermen, and eventually pack and export.  

For today’s topic, I would like to take you on a quick journey of aquacultured coral hunting in Northern Bali.  This is a compressed version of this trip and soon I will be posting a full version with three times more photos on my blog.  But before getting started, let’s have a quick look at my background in this very difficult and sometimes frustrating industry.  You can read more in detail of how I ended up in Indonesia on my blog.   Just click under “about me” under favorites on my blog page.

My background includes 10 years in the aquarium service business.  One of the highlights of running the largest custom design and maintenance company in the San Francisco area, was working with Pixar animation studios in making “Finding Nemo”.