Blue Ridge Coral

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have one of these? According to the description on liveaquaria, it seems like the perfect coral, although I have not seen one that looks as good as the one they have in this picture.

http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod ... CatId=2505

 

[LeatherFace]

i bought a canary porites from them that looked nothing like the picture. its definetly not wysiwyg ehehe

 

[Anonymous]

Live Heliopora specimens are traded for the aquarium trade (2). Cleaned skeletons are traded as curios, jewellery and aquarium products (1). There is one species in this order, Heliopora coerulea (3) which must be identified to species level on CITES permits (4).

http://www.arkive.org/coral/Coral/heliopora_id.html

It is pretty blend brown in color, and only look bluish when dead. To see the bluish tint in the polyp, you need to have a very blue light. Keep in mind that a white piece of paper will look bluish under that condition.

As to the vanilla description on some sites as to it husbandry, just look at the well know fact that it sucks up iron to make the skeleton blue, but in the additive list, it only give you a bunch of generic item that they sell, and no mentioning of the use of a rusty nail... They should have list item # FE7892, Blunt Rusty Nails $3.99 each (free shipping does not applies to this item) :wink:

 

[Anonymous]

To have them polyp out as in the DFS picture is not a common occurrence. I've kept it and had it grow but only very rarely would it extend polyps. It's still an interesting coral but kind of a bland browninsh color - the blue is only evident when looking at broken pieces or on a dead specimen.

Have seem amazing pictures of shallow reefs in the Maldives composes almost 100% of Heliopora and it is an impressive sight to be sure.

 

[LanDoctor]

I have a small colony of that in my system. It took about 6 months before it seemed to acclimate to my system and show some growth and polyp extension. How are people dosing iron to their tank for these? I haven't done anything different with my tank since putting it in there over a year ago.
Now it shows great daily polyp extension and growth. I have come to really like the coral even though it is just a regular brown without it's polyps extended. When out the polyps are ~1/2"! like little trees or something.
Thanks,
Donovan

 

[Anonymous]

LanDoctor
:welcome: