What is your opinion on the hobby's status?
 

From sustainable supply of livestock, to quality and likelyhood of successful acclimation of the livestock. From high priced new products, even present ones due to greedy manufactures or high exchange rate, call it what ever you want... To shrinking retailers, to unkept outdated websites, to frustrations of no clear instruction for new comers, which is very tough because every tank is unique and what works for one doesn't for another.

I see this hobby shrinking rather than expanding in western Canada or at least scaling back to where only the ones with deep alliances with livestock supplies outside this country will survive, depending on North American wholesalers for the sustainability of a saltwater specific shop is a short lived life.

Did someone pee in your Corn Flakes again?

I can't speak for the larger centres but here in PG the hobby is picking up with about 30-50 serious hobbyists with about another 60 or so who are dabbling or considering getting into the hobby so I would say here it is thriving.

However like anyone not in a major centre we suffer from not having a proper SW store and we have to order virtually everything in from the major centres which if you don't know who or what is available can definitely lead to issues.

With that being said I think that the hobby is increasing as it is becoming more affordable and it is becoming more accessible to the masses and with improvements in tech and survivability makes it easier than ever to keep a SW tank. Even with the restrictions in place of certain corals and fish more and more are going to ORA raised which I am a huge supporter of and although ORA raised is somewhat limited breeders and growers of coral are finding ways to make even the hard to maintain fish and coral survive and even breed.

When one door closes another opens so while the hobby goes through a transitition I believe that in the short term you will see retailers jump ship but those that stay will become stronger and I think you will see the hobby expand more outside the major centres.

I just googled P.G.'s population and to say have that many hobbiest is impressive. Regina with over double the population in my mind would be pushing 30 people. From where I sit the prices have gone up considerable. Blood shrimp at $50.00..... What's that about.

I'm not sure what's up Mindy, the corn flakes did taste a little off this am. More just frustration with the LFS. I continue to go in, stand there shaking my head, which develops into banging my head on the front on the tanks asking "why do I continue to come back". I have the day off and if I was motivated I would be driving up to to see Colby's cache of gems.

I think the advent of more good online retailers has enhanced and made the hobby more accessible. The problem, though, is that the masses are just not aware. You'd think with the all the cheap(er) social media advertising options available now, it should be easier to reach out to those that might have an interest. I would target the freshwater crowd. I was one, and succumbed (albeit more by accident)... haha.

To me it all comes down to local support. Here in S'toon we have all of the support we could ask for, tied in with internet resources, it gives the hobbyist all they could need. Retailers just need to hold on until the new Finding Dory comes out... the market will explode again! Then they should have well made kits and informational pamphlets ready to go for the care and maintenance of clownfish & anemones :)

I do see a trend to more of your hobbyists fragging and trading, which will help strengthen the supply, but can hurt the local retailers.

I guess I'm being more livestock specific. Online for dry goods and equipment is easy to access but with me being in the market for livestock at the moment and very picky on what I buy can produce some very long dry spells.

I can't think of 5 or 6 online livestock sites but with sites being so outdated it's frustrating. I just let out a snort of derision when I read "site will be updated shorty"

Colby really needs to expand. :lol:

Honestly Colby has one of the best livestock supplies in Canada. It never ceases to amaze me at the corals and fish he regularly gets in! I think he ships all the time, just let him know what you want haahaa! From what I understand he is working on his site as well. He knows it needs to be revamped and regularly updated.

The problem with expanding in my eyes is that it's the people that make a shop succesful, and if you don't have the right people a shop won't float! Bayside is what it is because of Colby, without him it's just another shop.

Scott

I have Colby ship quite regularly believe me. Lol. But you can't replace buying in person vs. via online. Even your plate you posted that you bought from him recently varies from a posted pic. Don't get me wrong I trust Colby 100 percent, it just speaks to my picky nature when I write about my observation.

I agree, it would be very tough to open another shop outside of Saskatoon. Finding the right person dedicated to the shop would be near impossible, that's why Gustavo needs to move to Regina. :lol:

I'll still get some stuff from the LFS but with the prices online for equipment being sometimes a 1/3 off, I'm going to the internet.

Livestock I rely on Canreef members so hope the forum stays strong.

For info, books or the internet but not taking everything as truth. Given and overhead heard from the LFS not overly trusting there either.

The trend, in my experience over the last 15 years, has been on the decline.

I can't imagine were more than 10 or 15 years away from only being able to stock captive bred or cultured livestock and paying an incredible premium just for that.

slection is getting worse and prices are going up.

all but the best run lfs can't seem to stay in business.

I'm just enjoying it while I can...

Well when it comes to livestock I think retailers and wholesalers as well use the same suppliers time and time again it's sooooooo repetitive it's sad ......customers want fresh items that the other 35 stores don't have lol

Imo selection is better overall sure it cones with a price but the selection is wayyy better just not quite there yet locally unfortunately :(

I've been reefing for 5+ years and what I've noticed most is the massive rise in cost for fish/coral. I spoke with a friend who's a local retailer and he told me it's mostly shipping that kills them. To ship 4 fish in a box you're paying for the cost of the water to be shipped overnight and that's what Wrasses that were $20 5 years ago are now $50.

I've also noticed that LFS's sell fish in days. If a store gets a good shipment of tangs in you better grab one that day. the problem with that is the survival rate at home. The last 3 Tangs I bought all had intestinal parasites. I QT'd and prazipro'd them but they didn't last. That's over $150 worth of cool fish dead before the display tank. That sucks but it seems more and more common. I'd like stores to QT fish before they sell but if you go to JL in the evening after a shipment you can see them acllimating the fish in the shipping boxes and the next morning they are for sail. Roll the dice...

So because of the price and the turn over we have started counting on each other for frags ect. This is great in one respect but it also hurts LFS's which isn't great. If JL, King Ed, ect go out of business we'll have no place to quickly pick up a pump or test kit when we need them.

If I was confident my fish would live I'd have no issue paying $100 for that cool fish I always wanted but lately I just don't feel its a good idea at any LFS in the lowermainland.

Actually, it is the locally grown hobbyist frags that keeps the hobby alive. Besides expensive, I have found LFS frags to be hit and miss, and always worried about pests from them. I would like to see the LFS buy more hobbyist surplus frags rather than the expensive imports. Would be better for them (margins) and would help support their customers. Win/win for all.

Have you seen JL's frag tank lately? Thats all local frags for sure and they charge between $40-80 a frag. Coral is crazy expensive compared to few years ago. I get that we drive the prices, how many of us (me excluded) have paid $40 a polyp for utter chaos palys? Think about that for a minute...:lol:

I'm not really complaining, I drop $100 on an acan here and there but honestly I think frags of sps or single polyps of coral should be like $10 - $15 when we're clipping them out of our tanks but I'm an old hippy...lol

I do remember when blue tangs were like $30 though and now one that isn't a 1 inch at JL is closer to $70.

Its all a matter of how big you want to go to, my daughter has a 14 gallon biocube with 2 clowns and after the first set up hasn't cost very much, some salt and carbon, thats about it.

Seriously though, $40 for one polyp? :lol:

Yeah, J&L is good about that. I have sold them frags as well (and then watched them go for 2 to 3X what they paid me (credit). But hey, am not complaining, as they were not exactly flying off my own frag rack...

This hobby is full of people who love to pay as much as they can for things...

Complain about pricing and expect to get at least a couple "you're in the wrong hobby" gems.

I would thin with the exchange rate, Canadians may feel a bit more of a price increase than hobbyists elsewhere.

I do. Is the days a bit where you went into an lfs and might see something you had never seen before because it came in on live rock or something.

That just does not seem to happen anymore.

Not sure if it's more stringent inspections at the border or prior to shipping or if the bio diversity out there has just depleted to this point.

A trend I have started to notice and I'm not sure if it's driven by economics or supply is tiny fish.... Not as in gobies but 1 inch hippo tangs etc. That makes it tough if you want to add a fish to your display but realize with its size it would have a tough time surviving.

I love it when the LFS gets trade ins or surrendered fish due to tank shut down. I bought a giant Royal Gramma a few weeks back that was traded in. Didn't even blink at the wee over priced aspect, the size sold me. I also didn't mind paying a little extra for what I call tank tested fish. No guarantee but survival rate is way higher vs. newly arrived fish.

Those little tangs you talk of usually go to the higher paying Asian markets we are lucky to be getting them in. Smaller tangs in my experience adapt better to aquariums.

I think the hobby is doing quite well. Trust me this is not an easy business! It's alot of work with not much pay. It's a business of love. Stores come and go all the time, especially the online basement operations. These people see $$$$ doing what they love. They think it will be easy, get to see sweet fish & corals and get rich doing it. Then reality kicks in. They make half as much as they do with their regular job and work twice as much. Usually takes a year or so for that reality to kick in. Once it does they are gone.

My opinion forums are dying not the hobby. Go on Facebook, most NEW people are on saltwater pages setup on facebook, buy and sell pages, frag pages, etc. The hobby is moving towards social media just like the rest of the world. Yes customers come and go it happens. You stay in it long enough and you see old customer come back. Sometimes people take a break from the hobby for what ever reason. If they were a serious hobbiest they will be back. It's just a matter of when.

Then why are they showing up here? Lucky? or a diminishing over seas market.. What ever the case is it's an annoyance for me, I can't add a 1 inch hippo tang to my tank. I did add a quarter sized Clown Trigger but I was pretty sure he could handle himself. Question was for the other guy Colby not you.. Oh and for gods sakes man charge my Visa card. I guess I will have to go where the cool kids are on facebook. I don't get to "like" many things due to fact Im using the wife's account.

ya I don't know, I went to JL one evening actually hoping to buy a hippo and was shocked to see a tank with 20 dead hippos and 20 that looked rough. The store workers were quickly trying to rescue the living ones and pulling out all the dead ones but it was heart breaking to see. No idea what happened and I didn't ask but those quarter size tangs have to be what a few weeks old? I've tried 2 of them with quarantine and everythign and have had no luck with the little guys...

BTW not picking on JL, they are just the big store around here. I've purchased plenty of quality fish from them.

On a side note, with how fast fish dissapear from that store and how busy it is when I'm in, Id say the hobby isn't slowing down at all. I'd love a count on reef tanks in BC, that would be cool to know...

I wasn't directing my response directly at you just wanted to give my point of view.

There for sure are new people that come to the forums, But there are more that are hitting social media first. The majority of new customers I have seen in the last year or so are not on any forums that I am a member of.

Off topic but I would sponsor this forum if the prices justified the traffic it received. Also every sponsor you talk to pays a different price. Would be nice if the price structure was the same for everyone......But it's not.

The problem with hobbiest surplus frags is that in general they are the left overs. This is not always the case but my experience is as follows. The hobbiest trades his good stuff to friends or other hobbiests for other good stuff that he/she wants. Or he/she sells the good corals on forums, social media, frag swaps etc. Then they go to the LFS with the stuff they couldn't sell or trade to anyone else. In general it is either not nice or just not desirable because everyone in that area that wanted it already has it. So hobbiest grown stuff can be a hard sell for the LFS.

Where as a fresh shipment will have new colors or varieties that people in the area may not have yet.

Yes, I agree what the hobbyist sells to the LFS is generally the left overs. However, it is priced accordingly (to the seller), and with the the higher LFS traffic, they still seem to sell through pretty quickly. But the LFS also gains more business from the seller (corals sold as credit), and I for one will go out of my way to support an LFS (even if they are more expensive) that buys frags from me.

Some fresh shipments may have good colors, for a while, but in general I have found the hobbyist corals to be the most healthy (of course you need to buy from a reputable seller) and usually take off in the new tank right away. I have seen a lot of brown SPS sitting in LFS shops that were good size, but obviously not happy. I don't think these came from local hobbyists.

Also I cringe when I watch an LFS pop in a batch of new frags without dipping. I saw them do it with mine. I always dip (and usually QT as well) any new corals, no matter who I got them from. So far I have never had a problem, but that (AEFW, etc) is always my biggest fear.

I agree with you about the new varieties, though. Hobbyists (incl myself) are not so quick to offer up their slow growing designer corals. So if I was an LFS, that is what I would be importing.

The slow growing designer coral frags cost the retailer nearly as much as the customer, so the markup on those is even more appalling lol! It's all about having that relationship with your LFS that you can take premo stuff to them and they will treat you right ;) That way everyone can be happy. Just not the customer that expects to get it for cheap since it came out of some locals tank, doesn't work that way.

As far as pricing on fish and corals go. Many things have changed and have been changing for a while. All livestock is paid for in USD, doesn't matter if it comes from the Caribbean, Indo, Australia, Fiji, they all want to be paid in USD. So with the CAD in the ****s the prices have to go up. Freight never goes down, only up and that is a huge factor in the pricing of your livestock. How much does it cost for a plane ticket to Bali? It's not cheap, and what they charge for the box of coral under your seat in the cargo space is not cheap either.

The other thing is the internet. The collectors that grab your corals from the wild have the internet they see what people pay for certain corals and are now charging accordingly. Back in the day it was a crap shoot. You order 100 corals, pay a similar amount for every piece and you get 5 amazing ones, 20 really nice ones, and the rest would either be average or brown. Some collectors would be better than others but in general it was a crap shoot. In short you would pay cheap prices across the board, but the nice corals would have to make up for the brown crap that would never sell.

Now its a get what you pay for, the collectors know what premium corals are and charge a premium price right off the bat. They sell to the highest bidder. Americans, have more people in the hobby and have people that are willing to pay more for corals. So in general most of the really nice corals end up in the USA because they will pay more for them.

If you want the crazy corals you have to pay the crazy prices because if you don't someone else will. It sucks but it's the reality. Most Canadian stores won't pay the big money for the exceptional corals because their customer won't pay the prices the store will need to charge. The stores are not ripping you off. They pay more for the nice corals so they have to charge more for them.

One last note is that the corals are getting smaller directly from the collectors. They see a really nice acan, they chop it up into four pieces and charge the same for each piece instead of the one big piece. Some of these coral colors are exceptionally rare and are literally one out of many thousands type of coral. When one of these corals are found the collectors have alot of people asking for them and are willing to pay top dollar for it. So they chop them up and distribute to as many people as possible all the while maximizing profit. They collect these corals to feed their families just like you go to work everyday to feed yours.

.

Ya, thats all makes sense Colby Bay, for sure. As soon as Scoly's got popular a red and green one went from $50 to $150. Supply and Demand, its as old as time...

And hopefully your LFS doesn't think of you as a moocher (behind your back). I was in retail my whole career, so as a customer try to also look at it from a retailer's perspective.

I know my LFS owner hides when I walk in the store. I can hear him upstairs playing WoW while I am down around the coral tanks starved for attention :) I worked at Petland of all places for a couple years while going to university so I have that mentality as well :) Everyone is your best customer and they all deserve a deal, according to them anyways!

WoW Gross....... Maybe call of Duty Zombies haha.

Interesting thread to read. Lots of interesting stuff to say Colby, I wish more of the LFS owners would pop in here and put their input in too.

No, they would be around a year old probably, maybe more. A few week old tang wouldn't even be through metamophosis.

Almost everything posted here is from a business perspective.

Does nobody kind of see the writing on the wall for this hobby from an environmental sustainability standpoint?

We play a fairly major role in the destruction or depletion of ocean ecosystems.

Something is going to give sooner than later.

Well, if you don't want to deplete the oceans, you can always drop by my place....haha. I always have lots of tank cultured/propagated SPS available. I can't keep my frag rack clear, and some of my colonies are getting way too large.

Would be interesting to know though, just how many wild corals are bought/sold vs aquacultured. Could be hard to estimate though, with all the hobbyist sales. I know myself, I very rarely buy wild caught and the odd time I have, they have not turned out well.

Fish is another story, though, and I think we are a long ways off from tank raised tangs. And who wants a tank with just clowns.

I think you are wrong.
Pollution and runoff from farming, kills off and damages way more than our hobby ever could. The amounts harvested for the aquarium trade pales to the damage done by phosphate laden waters dumped into the oceans from farming and the like.

I have to agree with davej. We are a drop in the proverbial bucket as to what's killing the oceans and the reefs. Are we making an impact, of course we are, is it significant compared to other influences, not really.

I prefer to buy aquarium proven frags from other reefers but sometimes you can't get a frag of a cats paw coral or a big meaty brain. I think we are having even less of an effect on fish populations, barring the bangaii cardinal and introduction of the lionfish to caribbean waters. I fully support proper net collection techniques vs destructive methods such as cyanide. I'd even more rather I could buy is captive bred but that's not possible for all the fish I want to house.

Do I feel bad for being in this hobby, nope. Would I like to see it become more sustainable, of course!

I'm not trying to be overly negative but I will say that this is sort of my fear and the vibe I get surrounding this hobby as well. Maybe it's all the Hawaii stuff but my impression is that the wheels are in motion to severely restrict what we can get going down the road. Maybe it's the forum slowdown (at least in my head) that casts this feeling over me. I sure hope we continue to have the ability to get a variety of livestock. No doubt it's going to continue to get more expensive.

Great topic. I don't have time to respond fully, but I will later. Suffice it to say, my opinion is that this hobby has been on the decline for a number of years, with 2008-2009 being probably the plateau.

There are a number of reasons (which I will expand on), but there are many including economic and environmental. The latter can't be discounted as the pressure will mount on the industry. Yes, the impact can be perceived as minimal, but from the overall perspective of habitat protection, I don't feel that the long term prospect for wild harvested livestock is all that good.