Project DIBS

[c0yote]

OK, I took the plunge and signed up to be a DIBS Breeder. For those who haven't heard of Project DIBS, it's an online community collaborating on openly sharing knowledge of how to breed marine invertebrates. It's a grass roots approach with the ultimate goal of reducing wild collection of inappropriate or over harvested animals.
The current focus is mostly on snails, sea stars, mini-brittle stars, worms and pods. Here's a link to the current species projects. Some advanced projects involving corals are to come.

I know jnarowe is a DIBS Breeder and that we have our share of clownfish and seahorse breeders, are there any other DIBS breeders in the area? Combining breeder shipments to and from Houston can certainly cut down on costs for everyone involved.

If anyone is interested, please read Brian Plankis's article in this month's Reefkeeping magazine or check out the Project DIBS website.

 

[jnarowe]

Curtis, the whole point to Project DIBS is to have regional breeders rather than shipping back and forth to Texas. Currently we are shipping to Brian to develp the breeder network, but in the not to distant future, breeders will service regional areas both direct sale and hopefully to LFS as well.

What do you have to breed, or are you going to get some from Brian?

 

[c0yote]

Hmm, haven't heard anything about regional distribution - that's exciting.
As far as I know, I don't have any breeding snails at the moment (but got some Stomatella hitchhikers a few months ago, crossing my fingers). Only inverts I know for sure that are breeding are bristleworms, copepods, amphipods and mysis. I've got to watch my tank at 2am one of these days and assess what other critters are in there.

I've been discussing with Brian the prospects of breeding DIBS Turbo and Columbellid snails (of course not nearly on your scale) as well as one of the brittle star species. Nothing has been finalized yet.

 

[jnarowe]

Cool. Maybe I'll send you some starter stock. We'll see how Brian wants to do it.

 

[BrianPlankis]

Curtis, the whole point to Project DIBS is to have regional breeders rather than shipping back and forth to Texas. Currently we are shipping to Brian to develp the breeder network, but in the not to distant future, breeders will service regional areas both direct sale and hopefully to LFS as well.

What do you have to breed, or are you going to get some from Brian?

Jonathan,

You are pretty much correct there in that in the future there will be regional distribution centers and Texas will be just one of many. You are in a unique position to have such a large tank and the store that can handle being a regional distributor.

However, it should be clear that most Breeders will not be expected to handle any kind of distribution other than exporting inverts from their tank to a distributor. We wouldn't want people thinking they had to deal with distribution issues.

I will contact you both by PM on DIBS

Brian

 

[jnarowe]

OK. I get what you mean by that as it would be difficult for many to deal with certain aspects of distribution.

 

[jesseb]

I've signed up as well. Brian, should we just get stock from jonathan? - seems insane to ship to houston then back..

 

[c0yote]

I've signed up as well. Brian, should we just get stock from jonathan? - seems insane to ship to houston then back..

Brian has told me any decision about this may be 2-3 weeks away.
While we may save on shipping locally picking up inverts out of Jonathan's tanks, at some point we'll still need to ship our newly bred inverts back to the network (Brian), as well as receive new shipments of new species.

 

[jesseb]

Yeah - although Jonathan shipping to Brian to ship back to us seems insane or at least defeating the purpose of creating a distributed collaborative network that doesn't stress the animals. We'll just need to get (maybe become) the local distributor.

Brian has told me any decision about this may be 2-3 weeks away.
While we may save on shipping locally picking up inverts out of Jonathan's tanks, at some point we'll still need to ship our newly bred inverts back to the network (Brian), as well as receive new shipments of new species.

 

[c0yote]

Just gotta give the network time to grow, it's still fairly young in development.

 

[JoshF]

exciting!

This is really great to see. One of the most expensive aspects of starting a reef tank is getting a truly diverse assortment of invertebrates from the microscopic bacteria to snails, worms, and shrimp. Since they all breed rapidly, this makes a lot of sense. I've been on a hiatus myself for several years, but when I set up my system I'll have to look into this!

Josh