Hi Everyone:
As I mentioned in another thread, this latest trip was far more involved than I expected it to be and between stabilizing corals and my work and my email, and the board and catching up reading five new pages of this thread, I am only now getting to an update. All in all, I have now fielded 485 emails regarding this project which, as you can imagine, has also taken some considerable amount of time.
First, comments on the thread to date. Thanks to everyone who has contributed. To those who have corals they want to contribute - kevinpo reefsplendor, etc., you have no idea what that would mean. I now have nine sick elegance corals and one healthy. The healthy one dave sent has gone into decline after three weeks and without having contact with other elegance except at the original facilities.
I have all those specimens fixed and decalcified, but I will not send them off to the histology lab until I have quite a few more. I pulled some of the white web material from the surface of one colony and looked at it and saw much of the same group of bugs I do with other problwms that invovle dying tissue, like brown jelly....ciliates, spirochaetes, etc, but at much lower levels. I will do a gram stain on the material this week, and will likely try to isolate and sequence bacterial components from a sick corals soon. The problem is that most marine bacteria do not culture, and I may have to try different techniques. Hopefully, if bacteria are involved there will be an obvious group present at higher levels that are not present or barely present on my healthy coral or, if I get other healthy corals.
Thanks also to those who sent me two more sick corals on Thursday.
Thanks for showing up and clarifying your position, Mac. I think you offer some reasonable ideas, and I am also aware of how you contribute to other clubs, etc.
I won't bother to address all the banter over some of the defensive areas as it is off topic and has been well discussed with good points raised. I would say there are probably some interesting sociological studies in here, though...maybe another funding drive?
Walt Smith and Ihave spent several long emails discussing this project. Steve, if you are out there and since some voodoo hex exists between our email addys, Walt doesn't collect elegance, his divers don't collect elegance, and they don;t even know where they are, if they exist, in Fiji...they had seen them in Vanuatu, but never pursued them. They don't see sick ones in the wild, either, nor had anyone mentioned this project to him.
He offered some interesting explanations as to his thoughts as a collector why there might be a problem, and they are almost identical to the ones I offered in my articles "Do you know where your corals are coming from?" at Advanced Aquarist, and my "Response to Recent ReefNotes" on Reefkeeping. He also had other very real descriptions of things we saw that were not mentioned in those articles that may or not be factors in the condition.
Fwiw, Bob Fenner probably got that information from those articles, too. As far as I know, no one else has gone out with coral collectors in Indonesia except those involved in the work we did that was described in that article. Of course, as is the case with the grapevine, that statement is not really correct. Elegance corals are being collected from various areas, some of which are very deep and very far offshore...others are collected in shallow silty coastal areas, and one area we did not see reports collection in seagrass meadows. There are also large colonies on reefs that must be broken up to sell, but these are almost all gone from the collecting areas we saw.
There has been no response at all from Quality Marine. I believe one or some of you had mentioned to me in an email that they had expressed an interest in this work. Apparently not, but it sure would be nice to enlist their services.
As it stands, we have enough money now for me to try and work this project with what is available, but its probably going to fall short. We definitely do not have enough specimens, although if those keep coming, and if reef splendor and kevino can help, it sounds like we might be a go. I can, of course, use the money to purchae elegance corals, but then there will be too little left to fund the work on them.
Jeff at Jeff's Exotic Fish had offered to order Indoenisan elegance if I paid shipping, and I agreed but have not heard from him since. I will try and contact him this week or if any of you are nearby and can ask for me, I'd appreciate it.
In the next month or so, as part of a freight container full of corals for another project, I will be getting some elegance directly from Indonesia.
I still haven't managed to talk to the owner. Since they are in tanks with mixed corals I don't know if they would be good for the project. Also their handling of the corals isn't that great either.
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