plate coral divided into 9 after near death experience

[Anonymous]

I have this green plate coral for more than 10 yrs. It arrived as a tiny hitchhiker attached to one of the live rocks, and it was smaller than a dime. After it got bigger, it came off the rock one day. It never got real big, since I never pay much attention to it. A few years ago, my tank was going thru some rough time, and it was looking bad for several months. Its tissue receded, and I thought I lost it. It never really die completely, and little plate corals started to pop out where the skeleton is visible. After a while, some of these babies came off the skeleton, and now I have 5 of them laying on the sand. I put them in a plastic container, since the powerhead will blow them around. A few weeks ago, my MH bulb burn out, and it was without light for maybe 3 or 4 days. Too busy. Then I put an old Iwaski that I had laying in the garage, and some of them got bleached. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

 

[Anonymous]

how many do you have left?

 

[Anonymous]

I still have nine. Three or four of them are not bleached. The color may come back...

 

[Anonymous]

I hope so! Can you post up pictures?

 

[Ben1]

They should come back, but IME bleached corals dont always come back to their before bleached color and seem to usually come back brown. Rev had this happen with his red plate over on r2r. It died and a bunch ended up growing out of the skeleton. Kinda neat they do that.

 

[Anonymous]

Finally have some time to grab a camera and took some pics for you, Tracy.

There were more of them, but some just dropped to the bottom when I do maintenance, and I think they are live rocks right now.

In the top pic, you see 5 decent sized daughters. They fell of the mother skeleton, and I put them in the container. Some got bleached, but I think all of them came back with greenish color like their mother. In the bottom pic, you can see the smaller ones that are still attached to the skeleton of the mother. One is clearly still bleached, while the rest are alright. If your eyes are good, you can see at least nine individual polyps on the bottom pic (two are about 2 millimeter wide).

 

[Anonymous]

Wow! Cool pictures