Long before Australia started exporting an infinite variety of Micromussa lordhowensis in a myriad of colors to blow our collective minds, the rest of the world had to make due with ‘Acan’ lords from Indonesia. Indonesian Lord corals have a distinct and much more limited range of colors and patterns that at best, are red & green but usually a lot more muted.
Don’t get us wrong, we have a soft spot for Indo Lords since these were the first strains of the large polyp Micromussa that we ever kept but objectively, the most colorful Lord corals from Indonesia are not even in the same league as even some of the most basic colonies from Australia. On the flip side, we see several orders of magnitude more Australian Lord corals than Indonesian ones so when we do see nicer lords from the Coral Triangle they are actually more novel and unique.
This is especially true of a handful of M. lordhowensis from Indonesia we recently spied at Eye Catching Coral which introduce a purple color we don’t really see in Australian strains. They may not have the rainbow kaleidoscope of color that Aussie Lords often display but the bold red, green and purple colors are so well defined these corals would grab the attention of even the most jaded reefer from across a room.
Curiously these Purple Indo Lord corals do not seem to be wild collected colonies but instead appear to have thoroughly encrusted the kind of circular disc that is indicative of Indonesian cultured corals. Their wild combination of red and green mantles surrounding a purple oral disc and in some cases a mint green mouth is a bombastic alternation of color and pattern that makes these M. lordhowensis from Eye Catching Coral among the most attractive we’ve ever seen, and they should shine in both daylight and blue heavy reef aquarium spectrum.
