🐆100L Coral Zoo
100L Coral Zoo
Our 100L Coral Zoo project.
Over the last few years we've seen a lot of disruption of coral shipments into the UK. Most recently with exports from Queensland being banned out of Australia, and many familiar corals such as Acans being banned into the UK.
To safeguard against this we've started creating our 100L Coral Zoo project. The idea is that we collect as many types of coral as we can into a 100L tank. That way if any of these corals become unavailable in the future, we will be able to use these saved ones and grow them out for farming. This will provide long term security on many corals for everyone in the UK.
Follow our progress
You can follow our progress of this project on this page. You can also pop in store and see the 100L Coral Zoo for yourself.
We'll be creating the Zoo out of lots of little Coral Gardens, and you can also watch videos of us making them, and later today they'll be kits online so you can start making your own Coral Zoos too. The more hobbyists on board with this, the more diversity and security of coral supply they'll be for everyone for the future.
Part 1 - Making our Zoa Garden Coral arch.
What we used:
Caribsea Liferock arch.
Screwfix Superglue
Lots of kitchen roll/paper towels.
Zoa frags from our Zoa shop at Salty Revolution
A Peter to help!
You can buy all of the Zoas used in making this arch here:
Our Coral Zoo - Part 2 Making a Star polyp constellation!
Tonight we made a Star polyp garden using 7 different kinds of Star polyps.
What we used:
Goby home pack.
Screwfix Superglue
Lots of kitchen roll/paper towels.
Star polyps from the Salty Revolution online shop.
A Peter to help!
Our Coral Zoo - Part 3 Making a Mushroom branch!
Tonight we made a Mushroom branch using 20 different kinds of Mushrooms.
What we used:
Real Reef branch rock.
Screwfix Superglue
Lots of kitchen roll/paper towels.
Mushrooms from the Salty Revolution Mushrooms shop.
A Peter to help!
The Salty Revolution Mushrooms shop
You can buy the Mushrooms we used in this video here.
Salty Revolution solid natural limestone frag tiles
Salty Revolution Frag tiles
23mm square solid limestone tumbled frag tiles.
MULTIBUY SAVINGS: buy in bulk and save 10%, 20%, 40% 50%, and 60%.
These frag tiles are the same as the ones we use in store. We have used many tens of thousands of these. Each tile is cut from solid limestone into 23mm (0.95”) squares. The tiles are then tumbled to round off the edges and add a more natural look. Using solid natural stone has many advantages over traditional frag plugs/discs.
Advantages of using these.
Natural stone - Being natural stone they are much heavier than a manmade synthetic plug. This makes them less likely to be knocked over by flow, or tank inhabitants.
Corals love limestone - Corals love growing on limestone. Corals mainly grow on natural limestone in the wild, it’s their favourite thing to grow on. By using natural limestone we have found corals attach easier and faster than on any other surface.
Less work - Less algae. We have found them easier to clean than manmade plugs.
Easier to use - Being natural stone the surface soaks up the frag glue, making it faster and easier to get a really strong hold.
Uniform shape - The square shape makes anything hanging onto the tile easier to spot. Any pests are much easier to spot on these neat square shapes.
They have a backing layer - They are on a sheet. This makes it super easy to keep frags together so they don’t get muddled up, and easier to move, as you can pick up a whole sheet of 144 frags at one time. It also keeps the frags nicely spaced so flow can get between them.
Easy to separate - You can easily cut the backing into row with scissors. You can also easily peel the frag tiles off the sheet to use separately.
Reef safe - The rocks, and the backing are completely reef safe. We’ve used many tens of thousands of these without problems.
Saves space - They take up less room. By being neatly arranged in rows we have found we can get up to 50% more frags in the same space as when we were using round plugs/discs.
Better price - Not only are they better than any other frag disc we have tried, they work out cheaper than most alternatives too!
These frag tiles are made for us in 12 tile by 12 tile sheets. Each full sheet of 144 frag tiles covers roughly a 1ft square (30cm x 30cm) approx.
Link to Screwfix glue
Link to the Screwfix website where we got the glue used in these videos. We used No Nonsense Superglue 50g.
Dale Frankland of Salty revolution 1984 to 2020.
The Original idea for our Coral Zoo
The idea for this project was initially Dale's idea back in 2016. Dale sadly passed away in 2020, but, I know he would be immensely proud to see his idea finally coming to fruition.
WARNING! lots of pictures of nice corals, may cause drooling!