Ok, I am losing track of what I posted here. I am going to add a photo of this green kenya tree like softie I got. It is the fastest growing coral I have ever seen, does not seem to sting neighbors, and has great color. I use 2 6500K bulbs and 2 actinics, and in this photo you can see that part of it is getting the yellow light and shows as a yellowish acid green, the other part is more blue-green. Under 20K halides it really shows it's best though, that way it would be solid neon in your face blacklight looking green. But I put the halides in storage cause the T5's are cheaper and just as good for growth. (my opinion, facts are scarce in this hobby) It is a lot more intense in person but I don't believe in cranking up the color in digital photos
This is one year growth of a purple rim monti. It showed up as a remnant of one that died during a move, it was literally the size of half a pea when I saw it-like maybe 6 polyps. Now it's forming whorls and grew so much I had to move it, the algae scraper kept busting it. Actually I broke it's edges many times during routine maintenance. I had 3 other sites where volunteer plating montis grew, 2 were orange and one brown. Of the oranges one was killed by ricordea and the other is barely hanging on, every time it grows the ricordea move over and kill the older growth. I am hoping that one will eventually get out of the way and in the meantime I razorblade the ricordeas off and sell them. They quickly recover no matter how much mangling they get, and some people like them.
Here are the apple green zoanthids. I don't know the names from zoaid because I think they are silly. I know that is not a popular opinion and maybe I should not share it. My zoas change color sometimes dramatically so I can't see naming them, and some of the names on zoaid like gorilla nipples and ones with the word orgasm spelled wrong kind of drive me up the wall. So I call them apple green. They were a deep green with cobalt blue mouth and orange tentacles but have browned a lot so I will frag it and try to see what conditions improve color. Some seem to get more brown in the light, others in the shade. One was butter yellow when I bought it and now is purple, green and orange. Go figure. or it can be brown and green. I guess yellow must have been the bleached version.
The other reason I can't get into weird zoa names is I can't remember them, I have ADD. And I paint, so tend to go with pigment names like cobalt, vermillion or cerulean instead. Which probably mean nothing to other people. If I get into selling zoas I will have to learn those names though, and that time is coming fast. The darn things are overrunning the tank! I took handfulls out last week.
This is a nice colored fluffy soft coral. It is a little slimey thing, you can't hold onto it once fragged and it is very slow to attach so I am not going to mess with it. The others I can snip and attach in what seems like a few days. Took a year to get this to stick to that rock, and I had to wedge it between the rock and the glass to do it. Once it finally stuck I razored it loose from the glass. It had been drifting for over a year before it finally worked. It is a soft green, very flexible so usually sideways. I think it only eats the stuff I scrape off the glass, and maybe pod larvae. Very slow growing, but lately steady.
i have 3 kinds of gorgonian, this one is super easy:
I bought it from a florida aquaculture place, they grew it on a shell. I have to snip it back so it does not harass the neighbors. I have a purple ribbon gorgonian that has to be cut or it grows out of the water, and nobody wants the frags, it is just crazy. Maybe they are too small to be interesting, time will fix that. I also have a blueberry, which is a no-no. They do terrible in captivity, and I wanted to know why. What I found was that they are considered delicious by too many of our pets. One person said his tang ate the polyps, but my tang only eats the algae off it, which is good. Blue leg hermits definitely eat it, and there may be other hermits and crabs that do. My blue legs all had to be removed, and since they had turned nocturnal that was hard. I caught them ripping the gorgonian up repeatedly. By the time I got the last one it had only 52 polyps left, but it was constantly growing new ones so I have hope. I feed SF bay baby brine shrimp nauplii every other day to its delight, and I think it eats the scrapings off the glass and the bits from frozen mysis that are broken off. Probably the pods too. One thing i do to feed my small polyp corals is force spawn the brittle stars. If you take brittle stars out for about half a minute and hold them dry in your hand they spawn when returned to the water. If one spawns almost all will, filling the tank with a purple cloud that the corals go crazy for. I do this right before a water change in case it pollutes the water, but generally it clears up within 30 minutes so either the skimmer or the coral eat it, and even the wrasse digs in. Try it, it's really creepy to watch. You can do this with urchins too. I learned it from an old aquaculture book, it's what the people raising fugu feed the fry. Might be worth trying if I can get some baby scooter blennies. Will report back.
