The Borneman corals.

ram man

Superstar Fish
Apr 16, 2005
1,441
4
38
33
Arizona
#1
www.opportunitylost.org - The "Borneman Corals"

I lost respect for this guy a while ago after his tank crashed and he was rude to some people who offered other reasons his tank crashed. Seriously, some one ruining your tank by dropping the salinity... Plenty of house hold cleaners such as windex could have been used and are not in short supply.

These are in the other words of a member on NR who knows alot about the whole story. Very smart lady IMO.

"Anyway... if you want a basic summary of what's on the OL site, more or less, Mr. Borneman took truck-loads of corals from the Keys. There's a lot of debate over if he took too much and/or if those corals were ever intended for research in the first place. He did have valid permits and he did submit an inventory. However, there's reason to think that, at least once, he didn't follow the permit instructions that require FKNMS staff supervision when taking the corals. And the inventory, though submitted as per FKNMS instructions, doesn't reveal the enormous size (>50cm) of some of the colonies taken. There's then the question of why the corals were taken to a commercial distributor and if the FKNMS ever really understood that that's where Mr. Borneman was taking them. The corals were apparently contaminated (or assumed to be since they were housed at a commercial distributor that also had indo-pacific corals... so it was highly unlikely that they weren't contaminated).

As for the fate of the corals... that's a whole other set of questions. We don't know why the corals started to die or why Mr. Borneman apparently didn't contact the FKNMS immediately when they started having problems. It looks like, eventually, a guy named Craig Watson alerted the FKNMS to the crisis with the "Borneman corals" and Billy Causey demanded that all the corals be returned. Unfortunately, by the time the corals were shipped back, it looks like most of them were either dead or in very bad shape." - sihaya of nano-reef.com

Im sure most of you have already heard about this, so this is for those of you who have not read about it.
 

TheFool

Large Fish
Apr 19, 2006
323
2
0
#2
I have not read this fully yet, but I would be very wary of slating Eric for having illegal corals. FWIW he triggered a huge war in reefcentral about 15 months ago which resulted in him, and a lot of other noted authors withdrawing their support for that site as it was noted RC was NOT good at pulling pics of illegally collected corals. Whatever, this got horribly political as there are quite a lot of illegally collected corals in peoples tanks who are quite proud of what they've done, and Eric's objections were not well received.

He's also a certified researcher, though I'm not sure of his current post,so he does actually have the authority, experience to be doing this. I am not sure of the backgrounds of all the various posters on nanoreef etal. I would be aware that one of the big fallouts of the ruck on rc was that a particularly selfopinioniated researcher with a post doc degree who worked for a govenrment research body turned out not to be a post doc, or have any academic background, and in reality ran a boat hire company....... he was one of Erics sternest critics...
 

sihaya

New Fish
Apr 10, 2007
1
0
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#3
TheFool - I think the RC thing is a bit more complicated than most people think it was. Mr. Borneman deleted a thread where he accused someone of having illegal corals. That thread happened to be a very long, old, and quite cherished thread to a lot of long-time RCers. Several of the moderators were quite upset that Mr. Borneman deleted, not just his post, but the entire thread (apparently without permission from the other moderators). But that's just one part of the whole sordid story most people don't know...

Anyway... do go ahead and read the documents. Reefs.org has a good thread about it too. It got to nearly 40 pages before it was locked.