Less than a month ago we picked up a small colony of Acropora elegans from LiveAquaria which looked more like wooden branches of Acropora than a colorful coral someone would want to keep in their tank. ‘Deepwater Acros’ are notoriously difficult to keep growing and thriving with good color because either you give them too little light and they look like a manzanita tree or you give them a little too much light and they easily bleach out. By some sheer stroke of luck we found a perfect placement for this deepwater Acropora elegans where it has really blossomed into a beautiful nearly all-blue smooth skinned Acro.
Before ya’ll start screaming about how blue the picture is, we know, and we tried to correct the white balance as well as possible but the blue LEDs and the camera simply weren’t playing nice. In the image below you can see what this exact colony of Acropora elegans looked like about a month ago, with not even an imaginary hint of blue in it. We will continue to document the progress of this gorgeous blue deepwater acropora and hopefully find some setting and light combinations that help help this image look a little bit more ‘naturally’ lit, even if most of our reef tanks lean towards the blue these days.
So the next time you see a doo-doo brown deepwater Acropora for sale online or at your LFS, consider giving it a nice spot in your reef tank where it will get direct but reduced lighting and you may be rewarded with a beautiful Acropora that even experienced reef keepers have trouble coloring up.
