Relentless Echinophyllia Attack

It's a dumb idea to glue an acan coral next to an echinophyllia (or "chalice") coral. The acan coral on the left is suffering from a relentless attack once again. I have pics of the previous attack.

I must have done a good job gluing it down because it will not budge. The irony is that my hermit crabs don't have problems undermining my other shoddy gluing attempts!

Maybe I can place a rock between the two corals? Either way, the echinophyllia will probably eclipse the acan when it grows to Personal Pan size. I think I might have to go in there with a pair of dirty, old, rusty pliers!

This picture with flash is taken early in the morning before lights are turned on (it's easy to notice the white thread in the darkness).

A close up of the atrocity:

Hmph...I should have read more about Echinophyllia at Advanced Aquarist's.

Bubble Vs. Hammer Coral

I'm not one to re-arrange the corals often in my mini-reef tank. It's difficult to find the right balance of shape & form that you might find written in a feng shui booklet where the couch is not expected to attack the coffee table.

My bubble coral expands to the size of a personal pan pizza (with extra cheese) when the lighting turns up. I have to be careful because the "sweeper tentacles" will seek out any coral placed too close. Last night, I re-arranged corals and got some results in the morning.

Here you can see one tentacle attached to the hammer coral. A few more zaps from the bubble's nematocysts and the hammer coral will eventually lose its head and expose the skeleton underneath! I've already got a dead head out of view that I conveniently use as a handle so that I can move this coral.

On a side note, this rainbow acan is showing a lot of new polyp growth at the base. I'm thinking of placing this coral in a better display location. The difficulty will be in getting it glued down properly.

Acans

The latest coral hype has to do with Acanthastrea lordhowensis. Prices seem to be driven by artificial hype and, of course, demand in this hobby. How this is truly controlled or deemed fair in the coral market, no one can be sure. A great article describing the Acan phenomenon can be found in Reef Keeping magazine.

After lurking on the San Diego boards, I finally took the plunge and ordered up four headed frags of 5 color types and was just in time for the bonus frag offer at Fish n'Frags. This local San Diego startup knows how to post up the eye candy on their website. After placing my order, I was a little skeptical of what I would actually receive because their posted images were so colorful, vivid and crisp. Would it be genuinely "WYSIWYG"?

So far, I am not disappointed. Even my amateur shots are capable of recording the colors of these babies! Okay, so someone at the SDMAS meeting mentioned that the colors are vivid now because the polyps are contracted. (...and my bubble goes, "POP!") He went on to explain that when the polyps expand, they may lose color because pigments will space out. I doubt that they will look any less interesting when I get to that point, though.

I currently have them on a black frag rack that I purchased from a fellow on SDMAS. The magnets holding the black egg crate rack have been dipped in a resin which protects from salt water corrosion. The white egg crate is there temporarily because I had them situated in the refugium for a while.

You can see the exposed skeleton underneath where the frags were cut (with some sorta precision jigsaw tool?!) from the mother colony. That's what builds a reef!

Now I just need to head over to Home Depot and purchase some special glue and figure out where the heck I'll be placing these in my main tank. I'm having a hard time figuring out which ones I like the best; it affects their strategic placement in the tank.