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.
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/Grafted-Millepora-1-of-6.jpg)
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.
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/Rainbow-splice-millie.jpg)
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/Rainbow-splice-millie-2.jpg)
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.
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/Grafted-Millepora-6-of-6.jpg)
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.
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/grafted-millie-bali-aquarium-1.jpg)
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.
![](https://reefbuilders.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2022/10/Grafted-Millepora-4-of-6.jpg)
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.