Can hammer corals trade colors?

[Brian916]

I have a small forest of branching hammers in the central portion of my tank. I have three vcolor variants: purple stalks with purple tips, purple stalks with green tips, and green stalks with purple tips. As these varieties have grown into each other, I have noticed patches of the green tips showing up in the all purple and the opposite. The green stalks with purple tips seem to be a different in shape and growth and don't seem to be mixing colors.

Can hammers share or exchange colors or am I imagining this?!?

 

[BonnieB]

If they can, I’m going to have some pretty interesting hammers in the future…I have a black tip hammer, gold hammer and pink aurelia hammer all together!!

 

[thamnasteroid]

Yeah, it can happen; sometimes neighboring corals can trade pigments like this