Re: Coral pricing, there's no mystery about it. Reefkeeping as a hobby has steadily moved from a sort of black-magic alchemy shrouded in mystery to a marketable, replicable process. More people have gotten into reefing, and this has driven the demand for a lot of corals up. But I mean all those expensive frags are growing, and people are getting better at keeping their corals alive... so eventually the prices have to come down as the market gets flooded. For this to work we need to really try to build the secondary market, which is a big part of the activity that goes on on this forum.
Now one thing that you always see happening here is fad corals--bounce shrooms, rare zoas, designer sps, whatever. A lot of what we think of as run of the mill corals nowadays, like Red Planet, Green Slimer, GARF Bonsai, used to be really hard to get frags of, and would be really expensive as a result. As those corals became more commonplace, after so many generations of fragging, someone's going to find something new and different and that's going to be the fad coral for a while, until there is too much of it for it to be considered elite. This fad element is going to keep occurring no matter how many people are in the hobby, how much supply there is. But as time goes on the base of corals available is getting wider, more varied, and on the whole less expensive.
