Help with ORA ID's

gflat65 · Oct 4, 2009

I've got a couple ORA's that I haven't been able to ID yet. These aren;t good pics, but maybe they'll be good enough.

Neon green polyps, purple most everywhere else. I've got it near a MI tricolor, but the form looks different right now.

This one is all blue with brownish polyps, but the new growth is pearly blue.

This one is an old one I can;t find anything like. I got it from a LFS that has had a lot of ORA over the years. They've got a colony of this still on the ORA plug (looks like the old MI plugs (cylindrical and ribbed,if I remember correctly), but maybe they were used other places, too). Bright green body with bright pink tips on every corallite. Horrible pics, so I'm going to keep trying.

xmjxflipx · Oct 4, 2009

1st pic is most likely a bellina acropora

xmjxflipx · Oct 4, 2009

3rd is probably a red planet

gflat65 · Oct 4, 2009

3rd's definitely not the red planet. I've got a couple of those around the tank, and the growth form is really different. I'll try to get a side by side.

gflat65 · Oct 4, 2009

These are a little better shots (still not completely clear, though).

Pink and Green old school ORA and Red Planet (right). The corallites are not the same. Red Planet is a lot less uniform than the old pink and green. The pink and green resembles the Strawberry Shortcake from Unique Corals (which I believe is an Aussie).

Red planet

Pink and Green

Here's number 1 again. If it's a bellina, I got really lucky on that one

(didn't pay the normal $100 per ORA frag for newer releases from the LFS).

Here is #2 again. The polyps in the new growth are white, and the other polyps appear to be changing to something other than brown. After looking at it again, it isn't really blue. Not sure what I was thinking. It is purple.

xmjxflipx · Oct 4, 2009

well theres no other ORA coral that has a green base with red tips........except the red planet ......dont know what else it could be though

93foxstang · Oct 4, 2009

#2 looks like miami orchid stag never sceen the pink and green one before.

DEERE G · Oct 4, 2009

oracorals dot com very nice pics and descriptions

reef-lover · Oct 4, 2009

#3 is Marshall Islands for sure....

93foxstang · Oct 4, 2009

#1 looks like Marshall Island Green Polyp Purple Acropora ORA marks it PG on the bag found it on LA. Color is similar to bellina but doesnt have the same polyps here is a pic of my bellina

ahayes13 · Oct 4, 2009

could #1 possibly be the ora purple plasma?

gflat65 · Oct 4, 2009

I checked out oracorals.com, but didn't see anything like the pink and green (or anything else I'd definitively say is one of these from the pics). If his mother colony hadn't been on an ORA plug, I'd have never even thought it was an ORA... #2 looks a good bit different than my Miami Orchid, but this frag hasn't been under my lights more than a month or so. #1 has similar colored polyps and tips to my MI tricolor, but the growth form is different right now. I guess I need to let them grow a little more and see what they end up doing. I've got a good number of ORA's (even have some ORA zoas

), so in a few months, it should be easy to tell if I ended up with duplicates.