With LPS you have to think about the animal itself. First off the majority of the animal is water, it's a very thin layer of tissue filled with water. Changing environments from one set of parameters to another can be very traumatic to an animal where water is the majority of it's body. Also remember it has to pump all that water in/out of itself without any musculature to do so.
Given that you just picked up this coral, the handling of the coral in selecting it and transporting it could also cause a coral to look upset like this.
When removed from the original display tank, if the salesperson didn't take the time to 'upset' the coral so that it expressed alot of water out of itself and shrunk up then if they removed the coral out of the tank to place in a bag or container they lifted the equivalent of an ultra ultra thin water balloon out of the water filled to it's utmost capacity. If you've see the skeleton underneath the hammer it looks like a bunch of rounded razor blades pointed upward. The weight of the water within its own flesh pulling against its own skeleton is enough to shred the thin flesh. This can also happen if during transport the coral was sitting on it's head in the bag, or a head was sitting pressed up against the side of the bag on the drive home basically slicing itself up.
Now when you get this coral home, there is no chance it can immediately puff itself up. It needs time to heal.
So whether the coral is responding to a change in parameters, or to damage from collection and transportation, the head not being puffy right away is a natural occurence. If substantial damage was done to the tissue in the handling an transporting then you could lose the entire head.
Handling and transporting is especially critical with corals like bubbles and hammers that have so much of their size greater than the skeleton.
Dave B
