There’s no doubt about it, shrooms and corallimorphs are the hottest corals in the aquarium hobby right now. But every time a new group of corals gets targeted for hotness, it entrains with it a whole lot of corals that are pretty high grade, even if they are not exactly what the trend is aiming for.
Case in point, right now everyone is trying to get their hands on either jawbreaker Discosoma or full-on bounce shroom Rhodactis, either from the wild, or from others who are propagating them. For every hundred rocks of mushroom colonies that is collected for the aquarium trade, only a very small handful of these are what we would consider the highest grade jawbreaker or bounce mushroom.
The thing is, that all those other mushroom rocks and colonies are pretty awesome themselves. As a side effect of the current craze for the hottest corallimorph shrooms, a whole lotta other beautiful and killer shroom strains are also being imported en masse.
A quick tour of the physical and virtual fish stores around the country will reveal that in addition to the legit jawbreakers and bounces, there’s an incredible abundance and diversity of shrooms available to hobbyists right now. What we’re getting at is that you shouldn’t be discouraged if you can’t afford a true jawbreaker or bounce shroom right now.
Like all coral crazes before it, the high priced bubble will burst at some point, and the average price of these highly sought after Discosoma and Rhodactis will eventually normalize back to reasonable levels. But in the meantime, take a look at all the shrooms that are not carrying a fancy trade name – chances are that if it does have a name, it will just result in an unnecessarily expensive mushroom that you’ll have to pay for by the polyp, instead of by the rock.
Pictured here is just a small sampling of very high quality, but mostly ‘untitled’ mushroom anemones we spied at one of our Local Fish Stores, AquaticArt Inc. This spread only shows the very nicest of the shrooms that were easy to photograph, but this among other stores also are stocking plenty of beautiful rocks of mushroom anemones, both Discosoma and Rhodactis which are being sold of $40 to $60 per colony!
So as a final thought, don’t get caught in the hype, keep your eyes peeled for the other corals which are being overlooked right now as there’s never been a better time to score some sweet and affordable mushroom rocks.
