Quote:
Originally posted by Underwaterparadise
Actually I would say most of them that come in look extremley healthy and start to decline after weeks in captivity. In fact I was at a supplier last month and the 10+ elegance corals were extremly bright green in color with vibrant purple tips and most of them expanded after about 10 min. in the tanks!
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I have not seen an Elegance that I would call extremely healthy come out of the Indo Pacific in many years. I haven't even seen a picture of a healthy new arrival on the Internet. They do look better the first day or two they are here than they do a week or two later. However, the degrading health starts long before they get here. If you compare these corals to the Elegance corals we were getting 15 or 20 years ago, or to Elegance corals that have been in the hobby for several years, or even to the Aussie corals you will see a huge difference. People have been seeing these Elegance corals come in from the Indo Pacific that expand about an inch and a half, at best, from the skeleton in all directions and assume they are healthy. They are not healthy. This is why they come down with infections shortly after arrival. If you can find a new arrival from the Indo Pacific that expands close to 4 inches from the skeleton in all directions with long flowing tentacles then you have found a healthy one. Unfortunately, the days of those corals are over.
Using the color of the corals photosynthetic pigments is not a good way to judge the health of a new arrival to the states. I have seen these corals keep these bright colors right up to the point that they melt away and die. The best way for us to judge the health of an Elegance is through its polyp expansion, tentacle length, population of zooxanthellae, and the power of its sting or number of nematocysts.