Coral Colonies are So Fun to Unbox [Video]

After stocking up for more than three years you’d think that the Reef Builders Studio would be all filled up but not quite. We’re on a mission to keep and grow and gain experience with virtually all species and prominent strains of stony corals, a few softies too, and with that in mind we’re still aiming to round a few key groups which we just got a few steps closer to.

We’ve got our SPS and Acropora coral growing techniques down pat but many LPS corals will not thrive under water parameters that are optimized for fast and colorful growth of sticks. It’s only since we started regularly dosing nitrate and phosphate to our aquarium water that we’ve reached a satisfying level of success with species that are most commonly associated with lower energy and higher nutrient environments.

Eye Catching Coral is no stranger to the American wholesale live coral market and we recently tapped them to acquire a few distinctive species of large polyp stony coral colonies. Most notably we were on the lookout for some standout specimens and examples of ‘Australomussa’ and the Australian hellfire/inferno strain of chalice corals with red mouths and growing edges and that’s exactly what we got from ECC.

There was a time when you couldn’t even look at the iconic Aussie chalice color morph without feeling a pinch in your wallet but now that supply has exceeded demand, we managed to score a pair of small colonies. The coral formerly known as Australomussa seems to come in waves and there’s currently a small abundance of these coming from Indonesia and we were thrilled to cop a couple of these as well.

This is not a sponsored video, we just thought it’d be a nice change of pace to share an unboxing of coral colonies which are much more convenient to capture on camera than frags and we can happily report that all the corals are in their new tanks and looking every bit as nice as we had hoped. And as a small bonus we teased the status of our Mode aquarium rack which was formerly set up as a quarantine system but which is now enjoying a very nice assortment of shrooms, LPS and anemones.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Jake Adams

Jake Adams has been an avid marine aquarist since the mid 90s and has worked in the retail side of the marine aquarium trade for more than ten years. He has a bachelor’s degree in Marine Science and has been the managing editor of ReefBuilders.com since 2008. Jake is interested in every facet of the marine aquarium hobby from the concepts to the technology, rare fish to exotic corals, and his interests are well documented through a very prolific career of speaking to reef clubs and marine aquarium events, and writing articles for aquarium publications across the globe. His primary interest is in corals which Jake pursues in the aquarium hobby as well as diving the coral reefs of the world.