Interesting story about my plate coral

[kass03]

Well interesting to me anyway lol.
Years ago I got this nice green/purple/pink plate coral from flying fish (now live aquaria).
It did well in my tank for awhile but got knocked over 1 to many times and ended up dying.
I THOUGHT.
So last year I picked it up off the bottom (after it layed there for years lol) to use it as a shelf for another coral and saw a green speck on it. I didnt know what it was it was so tiny.
At the same time I started using seachems reef plus twice a week because I decided to just go with the addatives garf uses.

In time it grew. Then there was another speck it also grew.
It was my plate coral and it grew back 2 small plate corals.

Heres a picture of them 1 is about the size of a dollar the other about a 50 cent piece.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/kass03/Image047.jpg

I had the same result with my teal candy cane. It was almost dead and grew back when I started adding the reef plus.

kass

[daddavis1]

Nice, the reef plus is the food additive right. (Brown Bottle) Phosphate Free Amino acids and assorted viatins.

[kass03]

No not really a food addative. It's a supplement.
I know it has alot of iodine in it not sure what else but my corals love it.
Before that I used to supplement things seperately like iodine,strontinum, melybdonum (cant remember spelling lol) but it didnt seem to help.
Now all I add is the reef plus besides seachems calcium and reef builder.

kass

[greenbean36191]

What you're seeing is known as anthocauli formation and is a fairly common phenomenon with fungiids. That doesn't make it any less cool though.

Did you know fungiids can crawl too?

[Aquabucket]

Glad your new plates are doing well! They are beautiful corals and can be quite hardy after surviving shipping and proper acclimation.

On another intersting note. Yesterday I noticed one of my plates at the store starting to receed. So off to the fragging table I went.

What I soon discovered freaked me out! Two gastropods or snail like animals were living within the calcerous skeleton. One was the size of a large olive. Both had bored out little caves for themselves. I have no idea what they were exactly or how they got there. My guess is the plate ingested eggs or larvae of the animals and they grew inside the coral somehow.

Anyways the pie shaped frags are doing well and I expect a full recovery from them.

I thought pipe organs had all the surprises a fragger could handle. You should see some of the crazy stuff that hitch-hikes along with these corals.