What's up Reefers and welcome to my channel my name is Nicola Mario and
today's on video I did a little interview when I was at MACNA in 2018 in Las Vegas
with Tom Bowling, he worked for Biota and Biota is a super interesting company
because they make a captive-bred fish and I wanted to make a little spotlight
on them and to show you what they do and what they offer has a product I don't
like to associate fish with product but it is what it is
it's a super interesting company because its captive bred fish and they
tried to make salt water more accessible to people so let's check the video
What kind of fish can we expect in the next couple years, what is the new bred, you have something new today?
Yes, we have a few announcements at this show.
We are just launching the first time available to the general market
Captive Yellow Tang, they have been done in oceanic institute of Hawaii but Biota is now the distributor for those.
Which is very exciting news for us. It adds to the list.
Out of Palau we have a big number of mandarins
and coral beauties come in this year which have been in great demand and we never keep
up keep this time because I know the mandarins been a big hit they're all
eating pellets which is really surprising just right here at the show and
watching eating tiny pellets and frozen feed like there's no tomorrow. people have so much hard time with
the Mandarin and it's so it's so cool that so you can see that the people that
the Mandarin eat the pellets like this, like a big step for the community
Yeah, it's very exciting, it such a great fish for aquariums.
So to make it eat easy to feeds, it tick all the boxes!
and just by curiosity like how many fish
you sell is it like international or just...
No, at the moment we only sell in the U.S., we have a distribute center in Florida
We basicly target
about 50% mom-and-pop stores and 50% Petco, hopefully will do some more
nice and what's the like was a history behind biota like how I did it start
I founded Biota, I've done a lot of fish breeding well before Biota.
Has a teen I was doing all the freshwater breeding and I was about 14 I think
I did seahorses and they tricked me to get into the Marines, a long time ago and since then I
would studied marine biology and aquaculture and I my whole interest was
to basically use the principles of aquaculture to create a better product
to the marine aquariums and also to relieve the stress on the reef yeah I do
believe that especially nowadays to back off the pressure on reef
It's not to say the wild collection
can't be done sustainably but more often than not it is it is done unsustainably
and that's easy because people aren't being monitored so it's easy to just take and
and you know it doesn't happen everywhere but most places it's being
done pretty poorly and so we like having the effect of replacing some of that
demands with cultured animals that are going to live longer as well so you're
actually you're not just replacing that first sale you're actually replacing
that fish with a fish that's going to live for a long time that aquarium so
it's probably multiple sale and by replacing with cultured fish.
What are the advantage to have a captive bred fish?
like compared to when it's coming for the ocean so there's obviously the first
issue of discussing there that you're not taking it from from its you know
home but on top of that it's it's totally acclimated that's growing up in
the aquarium so we're ready to eat the food actually eating all the commercial
feeds living, including mandarins that are ready for pellets but also it's used to the lighting to the
coral structure things that are a little different than they are in the wild
they're already activated so we get emails very often about things like for
example our Rainford goby which is you know it's more of a common animal but
Rainbow gobies from the wild can be quite difficult
We get emails all the time of people saying they can't believe, it just swim out of the bag
And goes to the bottom eat pieces of flake food, out of the bottom of the tank
That is the big reward from what we do.
Our animals are truly domesticated, they are happy in the tank.
Is there any benefice in terms of like health for the
fish like compared to the ocean? We can guarantee pretty healthy fish we have
our own quarantine so we don't get any issues with diseases no crypto nothing
like that getting through it that are very clean we can guarantee the
source you know the work came from yeah so right now there's only from Palau and
from Hawaii and soon we're bringing corals and zoanthids from Panama
which is exciting because it's a whole Caribbean spectrum of zoanthids
that we haven't seen before so yeah we're really kind of trying
to pick out the unique new pattern and only culture so it's very me kind of part
of the market that we're trying to get into but from the response we've had we
know we're good and how like when can we expect to have zoanthids that's all
coming in the next few weeks
Actually you know what you are getting the exclusivity
So there we go, i hope you enjoy this video, i'm sorry for the audio, I
tried my best to fix it and that's what when your just a beginner in this
kind of interview video, YouTube stuff that's what happened so if you
still like this video please consider to like if you have any suggestions
comments whatever just comments below and thank you for listening
I'll see you in the next video :)