Why REEF JASE imports

I ran out of corals to sell.

Jase · 20 Aug 2026

I used to sell aquacultured frags. Then customers started asking “what else do you have?” — and one day I realised the answer was nothing. There were no more morphs. I had the same named pieces every other store had, because we were all buying from the same small pool.

That wall is the whole reason

Aquaculture is a closed loop. A few hundred named lineages, cut and re-cut from the same mother colonies, sold by everybody. It is reliable, and once you have listed all of it there is nothing left to list.

So I started importing maricultured and wild colonies, and thousands of possibilities opened up overnight.

Which is how aquaculture started anyway. Every named coral you can buy today was a wild colony somebody imported first.

What I’m actually buying

Potential, variety, and the chance to gamble on something nobody has appreciated yet. Some of it never gets a name and is stunning regardless.

I still buy plain green SPS, on purpose — a tank of nothing but rainbows reads as noise, and you need contrast for the loud pieces to land. And you rarely see aquacultured millepora anywhere, so somebody has to bring it in.

If every store only chased the named stuff, every store would look identical. Mine is for people who want to watch their tank change — not buy something finished and look at the same thing every day.

What happens before anything lists

Buying an import is the easy part. This is the part that decides whether it lives.

• 01It comes in and goes under low light. Nothing gets bright light straight off a plane.
• 02Quarantine, and it gets watched. Every import is a pest risk until proven otherwise — that is the honest version.
• 03A Spinosad dip for the nasty ones. Same job as the Bayer dips people know, without the collateral damage.
• 04A few weeks sitting in my system. This is the part nobody wants to pay for and it is the part that matters.
• 05A light iodine dip, then it gets cut. Only then does it go on the site.

Nothing goes on the site straight out of a box. If you have bought imports that arrived covered in things you did not order, that is what skipping these weeks looks like.

The part that’s worth money to you

You do not need to pay $300 for a Walt Disney. I can sell you the same coral for around $50 — provided you bring patience and your tank is ready for it.

And I think most people would rather take that risk across six frags than put it all on one. Not that one aquacultured frag is safe either. These are SPS. Nothing here is safe.

What it has cost me

Tens of thousands of dollars. Colonies that arrived dead, colonies that died later, and one batch I would rather not talk about.

What I get back is messages. “Look what this turned into.” “Do you remember this one? Look at it after a year.” And me telling customers I hate them, because they got to watch it colour up and I did not.

The honest downside

Mortality. These are a little more sensitive than a typical aquacultured frag. There is always risk. If I were handing them to you locally I would not worry much — shipping is what makes it real.

Corals brown out in shipping. All of them. Every time. Even on a short hop — and especially SPS.

That is the single thing I most wish people understood, and the one people refuse to believe. What lands at your door is not what the coral looks like. It is what a coral looks like after a night in a box.

The other downside is impatience — which is also, I admit, my favourite part. You put it in, it sulks, you stop checking on it every hour. Then a few weeks later you actually look at it and go damn.

If you want to know what my water sits at while that happens, it is all published here. And what to do when yours arrives is here.

— Jase