This highlights something that I don't think people talk about enough in this hobby and that is that corals frequently morph their colors in different systems. Water quality, flow, lighting, nutrients, etc all play a role in color development and can all be responsible for causing a color change in that highly sought after piece. Just because you get a piece from a good vendor or private collector that you know has the right lineage and had awesome color in their system, doesn't mean that coral is going to display its best colors in your system. That's one reason I've stopped buying the expensive stuff. I've also been pleasantly surprised with other non-named corals that end up morphing into something stunning in my tank. One of my best looking colonies is a piece that I got for free from a wild colony my LFS had. It has shifted colors multiple times in my tank, but now its displaying a greyish blue body, red coloralites, and silvery white polyps and looks awesome! I guess my point is, don't get too obsessed with the expenisve named pieces. Sometimes they can be disappointing.
Just kidding!
