These are challenging times for SPS enthusiast looking for representations of larger corals that are approaching a somewhat mature size, and it gets even harder if you want to see corals in more natural, balanced daylight spectrum to bring out the true colors of corals. Short of cracking open 20 year old books or scanning forum posts from 10 years ago you won’t be seeing nearly enough examples of how some of the hobby’s favorite Acropora strains can look when they are nearly grown out.
There’s absolutely no shortage of photos of Fox flame, Oregon Tort, or Walt Disney Tenuis with the colors totally blown out by all blue lighting, dark orange lens filters and a heavy hand on the saturation and contrast sliders. Thankfully there is a bounty of true mother colonies of many different corals and some of the most popular Acropora strains at the Top Shelf Aquatics coral farm where we recently spent the better part of a whole day documenting the most exquisite examples in our signature realistic style and color balance.
To step up the challenge one more level we didn’t just photograph these mother colonies at the TSA coral farm but we filmed as many of them as we could and we think you’ll agree that this is about as good as it gets. TSA’s broodstock colonies of many popular coral strains are peaking in their color, health, vibrance and overall health and this is precisely the kind of inspirational content that makes us love stony corals and especially the King of SPS corals, the Acropora.
Getting this many corals to look this good, purely tank grown and all at the same time is no easy feat – it takes a lot of dedication, patience and determination to succeed with Acropora like TSA has done. It’s understandable why so many coral vendors are content to chop up wild maricultured corals or to concentrate on LPS corals, shrooms and zoanthids which are much more forgiving. Big thanks to TSA for the intimate access to their precious coral farm, of which these Acropora are only part of the living catalog, so stay tuned for our next video highlighting some of the best Montipora colonies they are growing.
