GraffitiSpotCorals

Nevermind can't upload them for some reason, there on r2r if anyone wants to see them.e

Here are a couple of pieces I got in my box that I like. Guessing this is a granny, has nice blue polyps poking out but not sure what color it will end up showing most.

Hm, sounds different, good luck with it and let us know how things come out.

Awesome! Did you get to pick the pieces you wanted? Yea I went ahead and ordered a box of western aussie acros since nothing else is opened and they tend to be the nicer ones from there. I am really happy at how well they came in. I think the main problem with finding them at stores or ordering from wholesalers is they have been shipped and kept in different lighting for numerous periods and by the time they get to you they are pretty pale. I like grabbing them straight from the country they come from so they take the least abuse. Much better survival rates in my experience. Glad to see someone else is buying wilds!

Yea I will have to swing by there again and pick up some of that stuff. It really seems like not even any stores are trying to get any orders in of acropora so I figured I would see if there is anyone local I can get a hold of thats getting stuff. Options are very limited I know but there has to be a few people interested in the same stuff I am.

Coral rx for more than 8 or 10 min is going to really stress most any acropora or sps. That could be part of the reason you struggled with them at the start. Smooth skin and some other acropora should only be dipped for 4 to 5 min. Once your tank starts growing coraline algae really well you should see the corals start to take off. I would keep on watching the amount of food that goes into the tank and keep things stable. Good luck!

I am curious if anyone is collecting wild or mariculture stuff right now. If you are let me know what your seeing from tonga and aussie if you are. I think both are still going but just take a little wait time to get in line. There isn't much out there since indo has been offline but there is still some cool stuff that makes me happy. I can't find any vendors that are selling colonies right now though, anyone know of any besides divers den? Seems that everyone is relying on fragments to get by for now. I am starting to collect again and am not interested in fragments from vendors, period.

Yes corals coming in from Australia are more expensive than other wild corals. Corals coming in from some parts of Aussie wholesale are 180 bucks each but are huge and most are bicolored, they are harder to collect and take more shipping to get here is the main price difference. These are the best aussie pieces and I don't really collect them much because all the others are mainly one color and over collected. Species collection in australia is not really diverse like some of the places that are shut down right now. Divers den is not really going to put aussie in front of something for price tactics, they do put shortcake and delfuego in front of their big sellers to increase the price to make money though. There are not to many other places to get wild corals right now other than aussie which is the main reason prices are high and most vendors are only selling fragments. If you have the right setup keeping these corals isn't really any harder than the others if you know what your doing but these setups take up space and involve a lot of electricity. Personally I like buying wild and mari stuff more than high priced frags that I already know are going to be a certain color. I like to be challenged and also buy stuff that doesn't hurt my pocket. Right now fragments of popular corals are not going to make me happy with these prices people are selling at. I would rather buy 20 medium colonies than get a few 1" frags of some corals that someone gets amazing glowing color from under only blue led. There are only a few of these corals I would like and I will just wait till they are 30 or 40 for a nice sized frag.

If your po4 is fluctuating in between bag changes it could be an issue causing your new corals sps to die off. I also wonder what the corals were exactly, besides a monti cap and where they came from, also did you dip them and for how long in what? Overfeeding could be an issue but its been talked about already. If your using gfo thats fine but the goal is to continue to change it often enough to avoid up and down swings and slowly get your po4 down to a low stable number, although some people have luck after some time of having high po4 but in a younger tank I wouldn't suggest it, even if it can work. Pictures of the corals in the tank and whatnot would be helpful otherwise its all just general guesses of what happened.

If growth and color are something your trying to improve and nothing is really wrong, changing things, especially that list you wrote up, is going to give you the opposite result your looking for. Sounds to me like you just need to let things go if things are growing, one year is about the point where you should be letting the tank do its own thing and let the corals grow. Once things are growing and stable then you can worry about tweaking colors and growth.

You have great taste in corals, most of my favorites too. I love the rhizos too, we got 4 from someone a while back but I can't remember what happened to them now. Very hard to find those things. Thanks for sharing!

roberts oxygen is where I always go.

I agree 100 percent, and am also with Matt in that I would bet it won't turn out that nice. A few people may get a good section of it but over time the graft will fade out, just my guess though. Way to go reef builders, you have helped reef raft bump their price up beyond belief in a time where they don't have much of anything actually new to price high. Some of the prices on these fresh cut corals these days makes me sick.

Hey can you get a better picture of that coral where we can see what the coralites look like better? They look too sharp to be a tort and I really like how blue it is but it could just be your lighting.

No defiantly not a tort. It looks more like something along the lines of a hoek or something, I forget the name of the one I think it is right now. It is a really nice coral though IMO, I would love to have a chunk of it in my tank...

Yea I have seen a few tanks with these high end frags only that looked beautiful under normal lighting, but, each coral is different. Some of these unproven corals that are going for hundreds of dollars a nub are new and might not look that nice under normal light. Most people with stunning tanks with high end stuff know what they are buying and know how it will look under normal light before they buy them. I stay away from any corals that are high dollar unless its a specific species and color variant that I have never seen. But if its pictured under all blue led and or has a filter I quickly pass unless I know I can get a daylight shot from the vendor. Unfortunately since the indo ban the variety of coral out there is really low so I have not even been looking for any new acros. Crazy new stuff coming out of aussie and tonga is kinda rare, and you can tell because many vendors don't have any new releases anymore. If they do its not as special as it looks most of the time. But like Bruce said, most corals might look bad as a frag, its when you get them growing well that the real colors start coming out. You can't really judge a frag that was just shipped to you on its color straight from the bag. Get it growing well and it could be a gem.

My emperator used to love polyps and most of the similar bigger body types like the koran and such will eat them pretty quick once they get bigger.

Yea muriatic acid is really the cheapest option, just don't use the water right away

Yea I am going to miss getting IO for such good prices, thanks for the post because I am out.

Now all you need is an orange filter and photoshop to bring out the green and you can have reef builders hype your piece I am sure since the article was wrote reef raft is going to be charging 800 or so for a frag.

I wonder how long it will hold in the frags that are cut from it. Normally the green pigment grafts don't keep for a long time. This one is the best milli graft I have seen so far and looks like it happened in a home aquarium or was grown out in one. I have one grafted piece but its not really a green pigment graft like that and it hasn't started growing out yet.

I am about to build my own reactor and am curious about finding a way to make it like that style so I don't have to have a controller ever.

Thanks for the pictures to remind our members who are collecting acropora of what they look like guys, warren your pic is a really nice shot and defiantly should help some people. The pic at the top looks like a large worm just moved over to a stressed colony and either cleared a spot to lay some eggs or layer them on a spot of stn. But sometimes the coral can be so unhealthy like in that pic that the bite marks are kind of hidden, when they are on a healthy coral the bitemarks are easier to see. After you dip a coral the bite marks become much easier to see for some reason. This is a good reminder for everyone to check their tanks for pests, especially if your actively selling or trading. I have got infected corals from a whole range of areas and by far the one I see most is hobbiests who don't even know they have them who are selling, or know and don't care. Me and warren bought from a guy on reef2reef who is one of the go to guys for people collecting acropora. People think wild and mariculture is where most of the pests come from but in my experience its mostly hobbyists and vendors who spread them, knowingly or not. Pests do come in on wild corals sometimes but the only thing I see very often is hairy crabs that will irritate the coral and eat it if its hungry. The best dips for aefw are melafix and revive, this way you can see in the dip afterwards too, and see if there was anything that came off. Bayer is not that great imo because your blind at what was on the coral and there are many cases I have seen with pests getting through, especially monti nudis and even flatworms if not dipped right. Plus its so nasty your often paying more attention to getting the stuff back in your tank or on yourself than looking for pests. If anyone has aefw or redbugs or anything like that just ask for help, I am always willing especially if your close. But the main thing is to not freak out, it happens. IME there are so many people scared of them that they loose a lot of the fun in the hobby, and they also bring out a stigma type vibe to the topic which I hate. Its all part of the hobby and learning how to deal with them should be standard practice for any acropora keeper, your not a bad person or a bad reefer if the made it into your tank. It is possible to clean your tank so you can trade and sell stuff later on. They are not going to wipe out your tank in a week or month or anything, but they are horribly annoying especially in a tank with acropora that are unhealthy to begin with. The key is to keep your corals healthy and baste them every day to keep the population down and eggs from being laid until you can figure out what you want to do to get rid of them. Setting up a quick QT tank is always asking for coral death imo, and dipping from the tank if its an option is the easiest and least stressful on the corals because they go right back in the same spot. Also a lot of people preach that a QT is the only sure way to get rid of them but thats not true at all. Dipping from the display will work just as good if done right so don't ever let someone make you set up a junky QT tank thats just going to further stress your corals.

Is it from cleaning the glass or is it just that old?

The coral looks more like a poci than a birds nest.