First German sexual CORAL breeding station – MUST SEE!

Today we are in Wilhelmshaven in Germany for having a closer look into the first German sexual breeding station for corals.

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This channel offers you the opportunity to collect ideas around the topic of sea water aquariums. It shows the spatial and technical possibilities to set up your reef tank at home in the living room, bedroom or office.

For this we travel through Europe to capture the perfect pictures for you.

So please enjoy and best regards

Tobias Neyer

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These corals were small tiny one MIM lavies and you have grown them up here very very successfully they’re very tasty they’re very helpless they’re very welcome snack on the reef not be any water left in this tank the bigger the coral is the more eggs are released and

The more sperm are released and that’s a ginormous amount of fat it’s unbelievable for an hobby enthus like me to see something like that Hello and welcome to C friendly reef and to new video here on that little Channel today we are in Willams Haven and maybe uh you can film right outside so we can have a look at the beautiful beautiful German weather today minus one degree perfect perfect

For a video in a coral Farm today so let me introduce Moren and Sam from the University here in vam but the university is called aldenberg isn’t it exactly hi I’m maren I’m a scientist here at the University of oldenberg this is Sam who he is also a scientist here

And this is the aquarium facility of the University of oldenberg but especially the working group environmental biochemistry of Prof Professor Peter sh this is all a coral aquarium facility or a tropical aquarium facility but the research focus of our working group is not just corals but also deep sea a lot

Of microbial work um cold water N Sea but in here we only have the tropical coral reef organisms and we have to say something very important it is not about the aquarium hobby scene here so we’re talking about science stuff you are researching in multiple ways breeding

Corals for restocking we have a lot of uh different uh research interests in corals so we did a lot of different work over the years looking at uh effects that like we humans have like sedimentation uh temperature all kinds of effects that we have on corals how

The effects uh yeah influence the corals especially the juvenile corals this is really what we are very interested in the juvenile corals are very different than adult corals and this is kind of uh our piece of interest that we have and in my opinion it is so great to have

These guys here on the channel because I think it would be nice to have that also for the aquarium hobby one day maybe this can be possible but I want to give you a little insight into uh that facility here and maybe you can uh see

It we do not have that much space here so I will pick you up uh I will show some pictures and then we start directly into the topic [Applause] we have a lot of different interests one interest that we have is the coral lava settlement so the corals spawn and release the eggs and sperm into the water column and then uh the embryos develop and develop into a little tiny lvi that have to find their spot on the

Sea floor where they grow and they can’t move afterwards so the decision on where the lry settles is extremely important and we want to find out okay what is it that brings those little larvea to settle in a specific place we research uh quite a lot of it the biofilms and

The individual chemical compounds that induce the settlement in the coral larvae to actually uh go on with our research we have to create Coral larve right so we actually have uh Coral spawnings here in our facility and these are actually juvenile corals that are completely grown here in Germany so

These are Corporal tenuis that we had uh spawn here and they are now 2 years old created from Coral ly that we had settle on those little tiles guys just for giving you an idea how amazing this project is we’re talking about corals uh which are not Fred like usual like we

Know this from many many shops uh doing this in a successful way these corals were small tiny one MIM one mm lavies and you have grown them up here very very successfully and this is it’s unbelievable for an hobby Enthusiast like me to see something like

That I I hope you can see how important this this type of science is for the future because in my opinion it is in 10 15 20 years completely usual to do it in this way especially the um research that we do with col La resettlement has begun

In Guam where our professor Peter shup he was already working as a professor in Guam for many years and we started uh collaborating with him in 2010 for our Bachelor thesises um back then and so it has yeah has been a really long time in the works to achieve this kind of

Settlement work we really have to combine a lot of different kinds of knowledge in our working group we of course need the aquaristic knowledge to just keep the corals happy in here but of course we need the scientific background we need the chemical background to combine all of these

Things to actually achieve the successful Coral AAL settlement we have a very interesting type of aquarium here I mean maybe you have to know we have a huge community in the Marine uh design and aquascaping uh hobby area so I think this is not the typical way to uh yeah

Escape a a reef tank normally in a living room maybe you can uh talk a little bit about it what you created here yeah this is definitely not your typical reef tank as you see it in uh in a home aquarium um this has just been uh

Basically left alone to a lot of parts so we there is like No reef rock in here or anything this is all grown Coral that have kind of started to overgrow this Coral tank and as you can see here this has been like uh this was all Coral that

Died off and here you can see kind of how a natural Reef develops you can see here um the sponges growing in the darker areas you can see a lot of different kinds of uh Little Critters that live also in the deep in the coral reef so it’s kind of

An interesting aquarium to show also to students what a reef looks like even in the deeper areas it’s super interesting because normally small islands for example uh are created in that way isn’t it you have a coral then the coral is overgrown from another coral and the

Skeleton is uh left there exactly they create the threedimensional structure you can really see it here and you can also see it here on the top the corals really grow up to the surface area and of course they can’t grow over it but there you kind of see the creation of an

Ethel and we actually had to cut out a lot of times already cuz otherwise there would not be any water left in this tank so we just cut out a little bit in the front but we kind of uh try to leave it alone and you have your small lonely

Mangrove over there for showing the island style yeah exactly yeah it’s bit how like an island is created and mangr are starting to grow uh has not come here naturally but also not the typical uh Reef hobbyist style shape of a reef tank here is that one you have yeah quite

Interesting montias here here you can finally see that it’s definitely not like a show aquarium this is corals we work with this is uh Monti pora and we create little uh discs of these to test them in experiments um there we do experiments with different toxicological compounds and we do

Ecotoxicological testing on corals and we try to create a system that is really reliable and that can uh yeah that always gives you the same results and that can be tested with a variety of different chemical compounds because we actually know very little about what chemical compounds that as people put in

The oceans do especially with corals they uh of course we have some knowledge but very very little much less than you would expect one of our goals is to get much better knowledge about this so you cut out these small holes here mhm out of the montipora to have equal pieces

From the same coral for uh doing some tests regarding to temperature and toxic that you have the perfect reference we try to create always kind of the same Coral piece that is kind of standardized if you always have like different shapes and stuff it’s a bit more difficult to

Get the data that we want and also to always have the same result basically which is important uh that it is reproducible your results so that is an idea we came up with and that works quite well my research focus is coral biology but I’m part of the environmental

Biochemistry and my wife Marine already told you about our working group the environmental bio chemistry that has a vast array of research topics but I’m located in the coral biology basically I’m the guy in charge of this facility here I have been in charge for 10 years

Now and I give my best to not only keep the corals happy and growing but also reproduce them and that brings me to a research project that has been going on for quite a while and uh we’ll go into more detail but let’s first do a little

Tour of the facility so you know uh where we are working actually great idea Sam the whole facility has a volume of about 6 and 12,000 L it’s one recirculating system we have a of course a sump tank that contains all the essentials basically skimmer particulate filter dosing systems activated charcoal

Main pump Etc so nothing fancy it’s basically regular Coral aquaculture just like we know it from the hobby scene exactly just maybe a bit bigger but I’m sure there is many hobbyist that have much bigger facilities than we have and if you know that maybe from science you

Do not always have uh the finance background I would say for building reef tanks we sometimes have on that channel here with the highend super expensive stuff uh and I think it’s a great point to to mention that you do not need that you do not need that for successful reefing so we

See here a fleece filter a skimmer some uh carbon and a dozing system and that’s it and yeah maybe we have to think about that more often exactly yeah it doesn’t always have to be super fancy you can see our dosing system is a bit of a makeshift Arrangement but it has been

Running successfully for more than 10 years for the dosing we do the classical Bing system with the addition of the a andk elements at night we dose calasa to balance out the pH a bit so that has been a very successful way to run our facility so the whole facility consists

Of five rows of Aquaria in which we can run different experiments I’m not going to go into detail of all the experiments Marine already told you about the toxicological experiments for instance but we also run experiments on heat stress to see how heat resilient corals can be one aspect that is really

Important for research is the juvenile corals so the juvenile or baby corals they are much different from their um parents physiologically so they’re of course they’re more sensitive to certain stressors because they’re small they’re very tasty they’re very helpless they’re very welcome snack on the reef basically

But if they grow up in the early phases they’re also more plastic so so they have more ways to um within a certain range of course to acclimate and adapt to new conditions and that is what is really interesting for us and that gives us a little bit of hope that maybe not

Everything is lost in the future and that coral reefs May persist Beyond this Century so we’re working in that area as well now I talked a bit about what we do with the juvenile corals and with the lar and Marine already told you about the settlement process but to get these

Lar you need to get corals to spawn either you go to the field to the mass spawning events which we did in the past many times since 2010 but then suddenly there was a pandemic and there was no travel but we still wanted to keep on working with these juvenile corals right

Also in Germany we had a pandemic okay yeah we did as far as I remember there was something and there’s a bit of a blur but uh yeah uh so there was no travel anymore and we needed or wanted to continue our research then the idea

Came up why not do it here and luckily our great colleague Jamie Craigs from hornman museum in London all of you know him I’m very sure of that or probably all of you he was the first to actually spawn called successfully in an artificial environment just a few years

Prior I think it was 2013 or 14 and he has been doing that with great success uh ever since we thought why not do it here as well and the facility we have here that’s not quite possible so we need another facility and luckily with a generous help of Tropic Marin we could

Start a project about cor reproduction here in Willams Haven and obtain such a facility the whole facility is running with Tropic Marine isn’t it yeah yeah so most of the products we use here to to run our facilities like chemicals for the Bing system the amk elements also

Fish food we use the Omega vital a lot and of course our whole facility is running on the pro Reef sold from Tropic Marin and has been running for many years now in a very successful way I have one question is it possible to do things like that also also in a private

Reef tank so maybe some of you guys also have some spawning effects of corals Suddenly at night it could be happen but is it possible to to have these shiven Niles um maybe in an in a sump or in a frag tank next to your home reef tank

And to rise them up so of course there’s the chance that you may have a spontaneous spawning of corals we had that in that facility here as well but it’s not predictable so you don’t know if you don’t simulate a a yearly cycle with a seasonality you have literally no

Idea when your corals or if your corals are going to spawn so there is a chance they may spawn but then after the spawning when the eggs and sperm are in the water basically the whole system of an aquarium as we run it here is kind of

A death trap for all these eggs and sperm and one thing to add the bigger the coral is the more eggs are released and the more sperm are released and that’s a ginormous amount of fat and protein that you don’t don’t necessarily want to have in your system if there’s a

Spawning it’s I recommend to be there in the same room how can I imagine is the whole water cloudy or okay yeah basically to talk more about the coral spawning we will do a little Excursion to our second facility I can tell you more about the call reproduction project that we have

Been running for a couple years now with the support of Tropic Marin guys maybe you’re watching from Florida or from warmer country so in Germany in December it is not that funny and especially in that part of Germany isn’t it Sam yeah uh the the snow we see here the winter

Wonderland is not the standard for December usually it’s just above freezing and gray skies and non-stop rain so it’s actually a quite nice break from that anyways but enough of the German winter I would suggest we enter the Australian summer yes that is the best idea you ever had in my

Opinion all right Justin time before the Sun is setting can see it I do not see anything here just one second we are now in a ship container isn’t it exactly Welcome to our shipping container our new facility this container was actually outfitted and built by a coral spawning

Lab it’s a company that is run by Jamie Craigs and and Vincent Thomas is located in in London and they made this possible so as I mentioned the pandemic hit there was no travel anymore the research need to go on and so we thought hey let’s

Just ask the best in the field and they can set up this so that’s that’s what they did and then the shipping container went on an actual ship and found its way across the North Sea to us here in Willams all the corals give their spawnings into the water and then you of

Course have to catch them out exactly so once the night has arrived and they’re spawning you need to be present actually because if you imagine the big acropora aera down here that green the green giant uh that spawned in October and the amount of eggs that comes out of a

Colony like that is is mind-blowing actually if you’re not there to to catch all that and remove it from the system the amount of fat and and proteins is uh not going to do a favor to your system stability you guess how many eggs can coral like this produce in one night

Millions millions yeah yeah wow great definitely I would say Millions so what we do is we collect the eggs and the sperm we fertilize them outside of the aquarium and then we transfer the embryos in specific containers to grow out the larv that’s a process that takes

About a week until the lar have developed and then we can use them for our experiments and for the for the grow out later on I can imagine that maybe some of you are thinking right now okay that shouldn’t be that difficult but maybe Sam you can talk a little bit

About the uh yeah hardest parts of keeping those small lavies alive and bring them into the next level it’s not the easiest job okay so the spawning happens that’s great and all but that’s when the work starts basically so once you have the lar or you you first you

Need to the embryos to to develop into lar which is not the easiest task as well uh but then settlement is a big topic and once they’re settled they have to to grow through different phases uh take up suion take up the right bacteria and they’re very very vulnerable in the

In the first weeks and months so it can be a very frustrating undertaking to try to grow out Corals in that way the systems you see here all three independent systems are run basically in the same way as our main facility this was unbelievable interesting s thank you

Thank you thank you so much for all this information of course you cannot talk about everything I know so we have some uh yeah secrets we have to keep I think all of you can understand that because it is a huge amount amount of time you all are spending for that project here

Or for that science so I hope you all can understand that but if you have got some questions feel free to write them down into the comments Sam and me we both I do not have your knowledge but I will try to answer some of these but

Maybe you can help me there you can communicate in that way for more informations you can also check out the Tropic Marine YouTube channel because we are filming also in some more specific laboratory uh areas not only here in the in the shipping container so feel free

To check it out too thanks a lot uh maybe you give us a like and if you haven’t already subscribed to the channel do it right now it is worth it and we all are going to see us again next week thank you so much all right

Thank you guys thanks Toby thank you man see you Around