The following article is a contribution from Mike Paletta to bring attention to an unspoken yet very important rule of reefing and sharing corals among friends, the Reefers Code.
我was lucky this year to be invited to give a talk at MACNA on the history of reef keeping. In addition to giving the talk and seeing all the new equipment and listening to all of the new information that was presented I also got to see many of my old friends, like Sanjay, Julian, Joe and Tony, many of whom I have known for 20 or more years through the hobby.
During our time together, we often discussed how much the hobby has changed and how there used to be an unwritten “Reefer’s Code”.我t wasn’t formal, and it was more or less understood, but it went a long way in helping the hobby get to where it is today.我n the 80’s and early 90’s when there were very few of us in the hobby, this code helped us to keep corals and reef tanks going even when disaster struck us, which in those days happened with alarming regularity.
代码的第一部分涉及共享。我们分享了一切：珊瑚，思想，信息，供应商，这些都可以帮助彼此成功的事物。没有秘密。一开始，我们很乐意将任何东西活在几个月中。因此，一旦我们实际上使事情成长，我们不仅分享了彼此的工作，而且由于反复试验，我们甚至学会了如何传播珊瑚，因此我们彼此分享了这些珊瑚。
The Reefer’s Code allowed us to keep anything that was hardy or colorful alive and in the hobby, so that if something unforeseen happened to our tanks we could always get it back from whoever we shared it with. At the time, we didn’t realize that what we were doing was selecting for corals that would tolerate the conditions in our tanks, while corals that did not tolerate these conditions would die. We did not frag everything as soon as there was a branch big enough to cut to make money, but rather to make sure that if it was a worthwhile coral it would become established in the hobby.
That’s why there are now some corals that have been around for 15+ years in the hobby. The code was if you had some nice corals you would frag them and trade them among your fellow hobbyists for some of their corals and in this way there was a bank of nice corals established. In a similar vein, whenever any of us would go out to speak for a club or society we would bring along some frags from our tanks and give them to the attendees and in return we would go and see the member’s tanks and they would frag stuff for us if we saw something we liked, even if it was the nicest coral in their tank. In this way, corals that were often unique to one area got spread all around the country.
我意识到现在情况有很大不同，珊瑚的价格呈指数增长，但是正如我们在MacNA上讨论的那样，我们至少将其中的一些归因于该法规不再遵循。这些变化包括不命名珊瑚。我意识到这是现在这样做的，以便可以建立珊瑚的血统，但其中的一部分是为了确定珊瑚的更高价格。
同样，并非每个珊瑚都需要附上一些最高级名称。我们了解到，珊瑚在颜色和形式上都因其储罐而变形。因此，以前做的是珊瑚的属和物种以及对颜色的简要描述，即。蓝色Tenuis，Red Millepora等。我不会忘记Sanjay放置4种不同颜色的Acropora Milleporain his tank and 6 months later they had all morphed into the same color.
我t illustrates how futile placing non-informational names on a coral is. Similarly LED lights and photoshop weren’t around, so the color of a coral was rather simple to express when you were trading it. Despite there not being pictures a lot of the time for corals, when you traded or distributed frags you pretty much knew what you were getting and the code also dictated that you send frags at least an inch in size – we all knew that as you got smaller from that size the mortality rates increased dramatically.
我n a similar vein, there was not the gold rush mentality when something new and colorful came in, and everyone wasn’t immediately trying to make money on every coral or fragment.我永远不会忘记第一个深洋红/紫色之一Acroporascame in to New York, Tony Vargas and the late Greg Schiemer cut it into thirds and put the cut pieces into their tanks and shared the third to not only allow the beauty of this coral to be enjoyed by more than one of us, but also to make sure that once they got it growing they would be able to share it with others.
我realize it was also possible to do this because there weren’t that many hobbyists so you could share it, but also the goal then was to grow corals into large colonies, unlike today when most of the tanks I see house corals no bigger than a golf ball or in rare cases a baseball.一个漂亮的殖民地的美丽Acropora，即使是一个普通的单色，也正在丢失，因为很少有业余爱好者能够耐心地让他们的珊瑚成长为完整的殖民地。
耐心是该法规的其他原则之一，在很大程度上也丢失了。据了解，只有至少一年的历史才能完全确定坦克，部分原因是至少可以从中解决大多数虫子。这种耐心允许逐渐，充分地测试和实施新事物，以确定是否值得做。Granted information now travels very quickly throughout the hobby, but so does misinformation.Only when things are given time can their full potential be realized.
Additionally, new things that are considered “hot” become the technique or product that must be used literally overnight, and as a result some things that have proven their worth over time are immediately discarded.如果他们是一种新的“热”技术或技术的发起人，“大师”以类似的方式迅速上升。The code used to be that in order to have this kind of clout you also had to show your tank over time and how what you had changed or what you were doing new was making it better.可悲的是，现在也没有遵循该代码的这一部分。
该代码的最后一部分似乎正在减少，这是一种爱好，应该是有趣和放松的，而不是竞争性和赚钱的手段。在过去的几年中，我见过的珊瑚曾经以每英寸500美元的价格出售，每英寸售价50-75美元。找到下一个最昂贵的无脊椎动物和现金的竞争可能会帮助少数人可以兑现，但是从长远来看，它将推动更多的业余爱好者或首先避免加入业余爱好。
我完全理解[]的某些方面的爱好已经成为very expensive, but after talking with the other “old-timers” at MACNA, we feel that this is at least in part because the reefer’s code of sharing and having fun in this hobby is no longer being followed by a lot of our fellow hobbyists. Hopefully some of the newer hobbyists now joining our ranks will come to appreciate the tenants of the Reefer’s Code.
