Is Your Local Fish Store a Hidden Gold Mine?

One of the perks of working as a rep at a good, coral based wholesaler is getting to see the huge variety of crazy corals that end up making their way into the hobby. On the other hand, one of the most unbelievably frustrating things about working with wholesale corals is seeing them get marked up 10,000% by unscrupulous hobbyist vendors. A lot of people think these hobbyists have great hidden connections, or that they pay huge amounts for them from online vendors, and for the most part these hobbyists are only too happy to let these myths go on.

The simple fact is, some of the nicest corals in the hobby can be found at your local fish store. Some may need to be colored up which takes a trained eye, yet others are colored up, and priced, just fine. This is going to be a small pictorial of various corals that have passed through here in the last 30 days (aside from one or two older ones).

Except for the first red mushroom that I just had to keep, the rest of these corals all went to physical LFS locations; local stores that rely on the support from local reefers. They didn't get turned into "Our Store's Limited Edition $500 Coral", and they weren't chop shopped into useless $100 thumbnail sized frags. Instead, these were sold at fair prices by stores that have enough respect for hobbyists to not try and squeeze them for every penny by misrepresenting their corals as the new hot rarest thing. Even though the huge misconception is that stores, online or otherwise, are marking up corals to exorbitant amounts, the fact of the matter is that this is predominantly being done by hobbyists that know how to exploit the market.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying every LFS is great, unfortunately that's far from the case. Most LFS are terrible. I can't throw a rock without hitting a store that seems to be actively trying to kill every coral or fish that makes it through its doors. But sometimes it pays to visit your local shop if it's a good one, or to go on a road trip to find new ones. One of the best kept secrets in this hobby is that the vast majority of the hobbyists originating these "LE" and "ultra rare" zoanthids and other corals picked them up from, you guessed it, their local LFS, and then added fancy name to get an even fancier price tag.

So, without further ado, here are some corals I've recently seen... I'm certain some of these will turn up in some hobbyist vendor's tanks and make their way to forum classifieds, don't be fooled into overpaying!

Acan maxima or crazy scolymia?

What do you get when you cross a war coral with a chalice?

I think this blue with red eyes Echinophyllia is already a "limited edition" somewhere.

What did the store sell it for retail? Divide your guess in half and you're still too high!

This is from last week, and it's the first time I've ever seen a green based orange tipped frogspawn. I'm not sure where the two other colonies ended up but this one I had to keep! For sure worth whatever the lucky stores that got it in will be charging...