Grafted corals are the reef aquarium’s holy grail. They demand a high price tag and are highly sort after by many of us. Acropora millepora is the second most popular Acropora after Acropora tenuis, and a good, grafted millepora is one of the most desirable Acropora ever.
We spend a lot of time underwater and over the years we have been lucky enough to find a few of them. To find them we first look in the very shallow reefs, Acropora millepora’s favorite habitat, and we usually manage to find at least one.
Red colonies with a few green branch tips are definitely the most common ones. and we’ve found them on the Great Barrier Reef, Papua, Sulawesi, and in Bali.
It’s only a couple of branch tips that are infected with a different protein pigment, in wild colonies however, and never a large part of the colony. It takes keen eyes to actually notice it.
The secret then is to collect these very precious tips and try to grow them into a grafted specimen. It takes some skill, a bit like a Bonsai trimmer, to then grow it on and achieve a highly prized grafted millie.
Since we found these GFP-infected red millies across a wide area we can only think that these are a much more regular occurring phenomenon. The biological process that triggers such a localized shift in fluorescent proteins is poorly understood. It is quite common in Montipora, and is starting to be more regularly observed in Acropora.
As more and more people get interested in coral and pay closer attention to them in nature, we are surely going to discover more with these characteristics.
