Jestersix

Trip to Germany - Reefing

Alexander1312

Alexander1312

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Visting my fomer home for the first time since 2021 and had to include saltwater related activities :).

Germany has a very strong and established saltwater community but shops and facilities are mostly clustered around larger cities and less in rural areas. However, I am currently at my wife’s place in rural Nothern Bavaria, close to Eastern Germany, and we found a hidden gem of a public aquarium in tiny town in the state of T, which has been in operation for 30 years now.


Not research driven as our heavy hitters in the Bay Area, rather inexpensive admission, and just fun to watch, super clean, with many animals we keep in our tanks (or want to keep but cannot due to size), and very limited commercialisation efforts. In addition to a ton of larger reef aquaria, they have a very impressive crocodile indoor area (did not take pictures of this), and a 1,000,000 litre shark tank.

Some pictures here - one of my favorites was the Star urchin (Astropyga radiata). I also like the stonefish.

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I have had a few additional reef related items to check off during my trip to Germany, and covered one yesterday which was to visit the Fauna Marin Head office and coral farm in Holzgerlingen, a tiny town near my hometown Stuttgart.

Their opening hours are challenging/limited but I was able to arrive about an hour before they close. Coincidentally, I run into Claude Schumacher (CEO Fauna Marin) who was about to leave the building. This resulted in a spontaneous two hour conversation and private tour of his facilities, after closing, including his coral farm and ICP lab.

He loves to share his view of a vast (!) range of topics including domestic and global politics, and of course all things reefing. I will focus on reefing here :).

From my recollection (it was a lot!), we covered the following (in random order). Some you might find irrelevant or disagreeable, but I did not want to bias the list below towards ‘nice’ topics only, as he is certainly not someone who shies away from a good and robust discussion:
  • Difficulties hiring employees both in Germany but also the US, except for ICP lab technicians, which seems to be easier.
  • His ongoing construction of a new large facility next door where they will be moving into.
  • His business partnership with Tropic Marin, which was more connected than I was aware off (more below). In summary, Tropic Marin produces his salt (based on a slightly different formula), and he performs their ICP based quality checks of the salt for them. Apparently, Tropic Marin will launch ICP testing soon, but Fauna Marin will actually perform this testing for them (samples will be routed to them automatically for testing). He considers Tropic Marin salt production state of the art, and explained what led to their salt related quality incident some time ago.
  • Scolding me several times for thinking too complicated about various reef related topics :)..(based on previous discussion I had with him)
  • Ozone use and related use of carbon: I will add details from this discussion to my tank journal. In summary, he highly recommends using carbon at all times, regardless of ozone use.
  • CO2 scrubber: I will add details from discussion in my tank journals. In summary, he does not recommend using one.
  • Irrational buying criteria of coral buyers.
  • His perspective on the RHF dispute on Balling light previously (20 years ago) and BOLUS recently - (Balling light and BOLUS could be a potential Q&A topic)
  • Recent Dinkins trolling event
  • Use of Bayer dip (potential Q&A topic)
  • Calibration and operation of ICP machines (demonstrated to me at his actual ICP machines) (potential Q&A topic)
  • Differences between types of ICP machines and why most of them created the poor reputation ICP has regarding reliability of results.
  • Significant expansion of ICP testing, purchasing additional OES machines, and an MS machine (due to external market pressure only). They will offer an upgrade option which can be selected after sending in the ICP sample to test based on MS. He does not consider MS the superior way of testing ICP though, and does not think this is actually needed.
  • Salinity testing equipment during ICP vs. calculating salinity based on reported parameters.
  • Recent visit by Charles Deelbek and the discussion with him.
  • BRS expected to go out of business soon based their inability to pay vendors timely (Fauna Marin does not seem to be impacted though).
More importantly, he offered to be available for a ZOOM based Q&A with our club which he said will NOT be a marketing event but an honest and direct discussion about anything we want to ask, including critical/challenging questions. He suggested to have this at his ICP lab so he can address any challenges on e.g., ICP reliability based on the actual machines etc.
 
Wow how awesome! What an opportunity, looking forward to some of the additional detail in your journal. I would like to hear what he said about carbon.

Must have been a cool experience for you especially - like a Catholic meeting the Pope! :p It’s funny that he gave you a hard time for overcomplicated thinking….
 
derek_SR said:
Wow how awesome! What an opportunity, looking forward to some of the additional detail in your journal. I would like to hear what he said about carbon.

Must have been a cool experience for you especially - like a Catholic meeting the Pope! :p It’s funny that he gave you a hard time for overcomplicated thinking….
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Haha. Agreed :). I am unfortunately not religious but it is not a secret that I highly respect his almost 40 years of reefing knowledge. The two folks I love to meet in person and talk to currently are him and Chris Woods/Captiv8. I am sure there are many other great individuals. Still, I like both of their straightforward ways of discussing reefing substantively, even though they have different views on key topics (e.g., target parameters, sea water-based vs vendor-biased parameters). I also like the way he delivers content bluntly and simply. Still, I recognize he is, after all, representing a company potentially selling a ton of stuff that might not be needed. He admitted this exact thing to me but justified it by saying that folks are asking for it constantly (like MS ICP, individual element dosing, etc.). I did not buy a single thing while I was there, and when I said I wanted to buy his carbon in his store because it cannot be purchased in the US, he said any high-quality carbon would do; it does not have to be his—more on carbon in my journal.
 
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Kensington Reefer said:
I hope you were “rolling tape” for posterity!
I know I forget more than I remember during such prized experiences

Particularly the relationship of carbon and ozone

Safe travels
Happy reefing
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Thank you. Hard to remember four hours of content packed into a two hour conversation, which is why I tried to keep some bullet points to remember at least some of it…
 
What a great synopsis of what must have been an amazing time to spend with someone with so much wisdom. Wisdom I find is something that can be misconstrued as blunt or too direct. Finding ways to incorporate wisdom into our ways of doing things, is half the challenge. Accepting different opinions and methodologies is a struggle for most people. The source and timing of information can be a powerful tool.

The unfortunate side of this hobby is that many people's success, simply does not translate for every keeper. And where one may fail, another may find success. So many products and ways to do things leads to what seems like an infinite amount of paths to take in this hobby. I recognized that early on and have still been led astray by marketing and community hype.

Thanks for thinking about the club in that moment. I hope we are able to rally together and get a fun event scheduled somewhere, where we can all come together in one room. That would be a fun event. And let's make it a German food event too!
 
Another highlight of the reefing part of my trip was a visit to the ‘Naturkundemuseum Karlsruhe’ (Karlsruhe Natural History Museum) - https://www.smnk.de/en/

The museum is about an hour's drive away from my hometown, Stuttgart, and about the same distance from Frankfurt/Main.

For us 'admission-spoiled' Bay Area residents, the admission is 5 EUR/5.3 USD for adults and free for children under 18 :).

The museum overall seems very interesting, but I only came for their legendary vivarium, and specifically for their reef tanks, including their main exhbilition, which is a 240,000 litre mixed reef with a female black tip shark. Link to their live stream here:

I thought this would be only a 30 minute visit, but I ended up being 2 hours there.

I will post pictures and links to videos here over the next few days. Please note that all pictures and videos are taken with my phone and my picture and video skills are as developed as my coral fragging and glueing skills (to manage expectations). There was also a lot of glare as these aquariums were in a natural light flooded environment and it was a sunny day yesterday.

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