I feel like you can try to look for an alternative seller nearby, why does it need to be from Indonesia?
We brought in only documented cultured coral from Indo and fragged it further. That was our customers requirement, nothing wild imported and then chopped up. It was all soft coral and obvious it was grown on concrete plugs, not cut, glued and shipped. That supply has not been replaced by other sources.
The ban costs us about 20k/month in gross.
An LFS told me that it is quite common that Indonesian "coral farms" would harvest frags from wild corals, glue them to concrete plugs, "culture" them just long enough to encrust, and then ship them....
do you seriously think they have so many mother colonies that they can cut thousands of frags from them to satisfy the worldwide demand?
Sorry, but if you see the farms in Indonesia you would not make this statement. They literally have tens of thousands of mini-colonies, just about twice to three times the size of an average Indo frag. Those get split regularly, a few go into sale, the others into growout. That is actually cheaper and less labor intensive than clipping small pieces from large wild colonies. Even with labor as cheap as in Indonesia, it all boils down to the question how can you mass produce frags with the least amount of work.
Interesting. Some local collectors (not all) are doing the same thing. Don't think they're marketing them as aquacultured per se but when you see an acro frag on a plug it's easy to make that assumption I guess.
Their reasoning: