Aquascene Ice Fire Echinata

[djf91]

The Aussie Ice Fire Echinata has always been difficult. It took me about 5 tries to get a frag to live and grow past a few months and that was back in 2010.

Once it got growing it grew like a weed. I bet I cut off a couple dozen frags off my colony. Had it for about 4 years before I lost it. I bought 3 wild frags, 2 for me and 1 for a friend in '24. Mine both died, his is about a 4" colony.

My original colony-- top down

side shot

Beautiful. By far my favorite acro still to this day.

 

[therman]

Do you think there’s a reason people have less success with them today?

Could be feeding, like @coral reeftank said? I definitely had an epic population of mini brittle stars in the tank where my Icefire colony thrived. They spawn pretty regularly. Here is some of the climbing on the echinata colony when the clam spawned:

I do wonder about microbiome "incompatibility" with other Acropora too. When it was thriving I didn't have nearly as large of a collection of Acropora in the system. While I was building my collection and other things were taking off, it was on the downturn. And when I tried again when my collection was huge I could never repeat the same success.

Just a hypothesis. Who knows. Now that my collection is small again maybe I'll have some luck.

 

[386reeftrader]

I'm in agreement with nutrition being an issue, but more so from a lack of biodiversity nowadays. In that era of reefing almost everyone started their tanks with real LR and there's just no matching the micro flora/fauna that come with it.

 

[djf91]

I'm in agreement with nutrition being an issue, but more so from a lack of biodiversity nowadays. In that era of reefing almost everyone started their tanks with real LR and there's just no matching the micro flora/fauna that come with it.

I completely agree. The liverock was also coming from the indo pacific and thus we were getting the exact microfauna (bacteria, fungi, etc.) that these acropora evolved in concert with. I believe the ecosystem of our old systems was different than what we have today.

 

[aquavista99]

This was one of my Aquascene Ice Fire colonies photographed back in 2016.

 

[coral reeftank]

I need a piece of the original so baddd! My current piece is developing a beautiful blue and is starting to hit its stride in terms of growth

I learned from a collector that this species inhabits shallow areas which are rich in plankton, which would explain its extreme feeding behavior