Flower Pot Coral

[Tennyson]

I just purchased a 3 1/2 inch wide Flower Pot Coral, and apparently, part of it (1/4 of an inch or more) is dead.

Is the dead skeleton part going to spread over and have the whole coral dead? What if water conditions are perfect the whole time? If the water conditions are bad? Should I return the coral before it gets worse and lose the risk of having my coral dead?

[John Zillmer]

Goniopora often succumb to jelly-type infections, and I have seen the infection spread to nearby healthy corals. There is very little chance that animal will live in captivity for very long. They should not be casually purchased.

[Pufferpunk]

They have a very poor sucess rate in captivity. Definately an expert coral.

www.goniopora.org

[DoctorLps]

I agree flower pots are hard to keep, but I got lucky I supose
I have had mine now for about 1 year!!!

[JokerGirl]

They really aren't that "hard" to keep as long as you follow some pretty simple rules with them. The biggest thing is to keep them out of the sand and to not handle them by their tissue.

Chances are since there is skeleton showing (and you indicated that the skeleton was white which means that the tissue loss is recent) that you will continue to have tissue loss. Whether or not it claims the entire coral is determined on if brown jelly infection is lurking underneath the tissue where you can't see it.

The best course of action to take is to do an Iodine dip once a day for several days.

[Pufferpunk]

Ummm... what about their specialized feeding?

[JokerGirl]

Sorry.. didn't know you wanted me to write an essay, and was somewhat relying on him going to Goniopora.org and talking to John about all of this...

Feeding is very important for Goniopora, especially when you first get them. Most of them require very small foods such as Rotifers/Cyclop-eeze, Oyster Eggs, etc... Feeding can be done by turning off the pumps and using a turkey baster to very gently dump the foods onto the coral. You will want to leave it like that for about 15 minutes before turning your pumps back on as they are slow eaters.

If you don't have a good skimmer, this will be difficult and you will probably end up with algae outbreaks from the excess nutrients in the water.

Futhermore, you shouldn't feed the coral while it's got an active infection.

[Pufferpunk]

I leave my pumps off for at least an hour after feeding.
Here's my baby:

[JokerGirl]

Nice

Here's my two - G. eclipsensis and G. pandoraensis. I also had a G. pendulus but lost it (and my acro) to a nasty algae problem when I did a tank transfer.





This is the one I lost: