It’s not a stretch to say that stony corals represent at least 75% of the corals we keep in our tanks, both in diversity and numbers. If you don’t count zoanthids, shrooms and anemones, then there’s just a tiny sliver of us coral diehards who have time to think about and room to grow the true soft corals – the Alcyonids of the Sinularia, Sarcophyton and Lobophytum genera, to name a few.
That’s a crying shame, and a trend we hope to reverse over the coming years by incessantly glorifying, educating and promoting the appreciation of our soft flowy coral groups. When they are a frag, it’s very hard to appreciate the subtle beauty of most Alcyonid soft corals. To really see their beauty and determine what makes a species special there’s no substitute for seeing large colonies of Sinularia and Lobophytum,
In the first installment of our video series about Coral Diving in the Solomon Islands we ease into things with a nice, shallow extended snorkel. The reef started right at our bungalow over the water and everyday we spent some time exploring the seagrass zone and especially the extended fields of beautiful soft corals.
In this context, and with video clips we think you can really begin to appreciate how unique all these soft corals are, and we didn’t even include every single weird colony that caught our eyes. Presented this way we hope you will also cultivate an honest factual understanding of where our aquarium corals come from, especially the part about many of the soft corals actually being more abundant and found more shallow than all the stony corals in this environment.
