My LFS has a coral like nothing I have ever seen before. I'm calling it the fuzzy super-small polyped stony coral. But I'd love to know what it really is.
It has a green base and TINY orange polyps. In person, the polyps reminded me of microscopic yellow polyps. The polyps are so small and so long, all you can really see in person is a pile of fuzz. I would guess the polyps are 1/2 the diameter of a typical montepora polyp, but it is possible it is just the extreme fuzziness making the polyps seem smaller than they really are and around the size of a montepora polyp.
At first glance they look a lot like hydroids (size/shape of polyps), but this seems to be a stony coral. Is there such a thing as Aleveopora (12 tentacles/polyp) with 1/2mm polyps?
The other clues that I have is that it is apparently very fast growing, there are pieces of it growing on the rock everywhere the coral used to be. And the entire bottom of the colony is covered with polyps, so it obviously does not need much light.
They had a number of frags, but I was afraid to buy one without any idea of what it is, the fast growth and low light requirements make it seem like something that could turn into a pest.
I'm tempted to buy a frag just so I can get a better picture of it. These cell-phone pictures do not capture what it looks like in real life very well, but it might help with an ID. For scale, in the 2nd picture, the green blobs in the background are hammer coral tentacles.
It has a green base and TINY orange polyps. In person, the polyps reminded me of microscopic yellow polyps. The polyps are so small and so long, all you can really see in person is a pile of fuzz. I would guess the polyps are 1/2 the diameter of a typical montepora polyp, but it is possible it is just the extreme fuzziness making the polyps seem smaller than they really are and around the size of a montepora polyp.
At first glance they look a lot like hydroids (size/shape of polyps), but this seems to be a stony coral. Is there such a thing as Aleveopora (12 tentacles/polyp) with 1/2mm polyps?
The other clues that I have is that it is apparently very fast growing, there are pieces of it growing on the rock everywhere the coral used to be. And the entire bottom of the colony is covered with polyps, so it obviously does not need much light.
They had a number of frags, but I was afraid to buy one without any idea of what it is, the fast growth and low light requirements make it seem like something that could turn into a pest.
I'm tempted to buy a frag just so I can get a better picture of it. These cell-phone pictures do not capture what it looks like in real life very well, but it might help with an ID. For scale, in the 2nd picture, the green blobs in the background are hammer coral tentacles.
