Acropora monticulosa is the ultimate ‘fractal’ stony coral

Acropora monticulosa is one of our favorite corals out on the reef, it grows to massive sizes and looks more or less like a huge living crystal when you see it in the wild. Due to its massive size and…

Caribbean Coral Reefs used to be made up of fields of coral

The concept of shifting baselines is an important one in reef ecology which basically describes how successive generations of researchers have their own ideas of what constitutes a healthy or a natural reef. Nowhere is this concept more important than…

Top 7 rainbow SPS and Acropora corals

As stated in a previous post on rainbow corals, a plethora of colors are not too difficult to find in the LPS corals of today. It is evident that this is an exciting time to be in the marine aquarium hobby. What…

Fields of Caribbean staghorn corals discovered off Florida coast

In another bit of good news to start off the new year, it was recently announced that a huge field of Caribbean staghorn coral was discovered right off of the coast of South Florida. The Caribbean staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis, is…

Reefing like it’s 1993: One Acropora becomes three

 The following article was originally published in Freshwater and Marine Aquarium Magazine more than 20 years ago and is reproduced here with permission from the author, Tony Vargas. This is surely one of the first articles ever on propagating stony corals.…

Unique observations of the natural habitat of Acropora suharsonoi

As far as cool “mythical” acros go, for us Acropora suharsonoi has always been one of the be-all unique and beautiful small polyp stony corals for the home aquarium. As an SPS lover, getting our hands on this species for the…

Observations on an unknown acropora copepod parasite

We hate discovering coral parasites of any kind in our aquariums but at the very least there’s a modicum of surprise and intrigue when we encounter something new. The last time this happened we were dealing with the unusual Skeleton Erosion…

Observations on unusually colored Acropora in the Flores Sea

During the Fluval Sea Flores Expedition we came across a couple of specimens of unusual, bicolored Acropora colonies. It’s always surprising to meet with a single coral harboring two very different color patterns throughout the colony. We don’t exactly know the correct…

Green Acropora solitaryensis being exported from Australia

Acropora solitaryensis was once the name of an Acro so exalted, merely uttering its name around reefers would be a cause for silence. Back when all we had were fuzzy sticks, the plating Acro was the holy grail of SPS…

Meeting the classic Acropora abrolhosensis on a reef in Flores

The eraser tip shaped branch ends of Acropora abrolhosensis are iconic to our memory of the early days of SPS coral keeping. A nice fuzzy staghorn A. abrolhosensis is one of the most classic and recognizable corals that many reefing pioneers ever grew…