Micro goni care?

[WhitePanther93]

Do micro and normal goniopora have different care requirements? I’ve had a green normal one for a while that’s been doing seemingly great. lots of extension and good color. However on the other hand every micro I’ve got seems okay for a bit and then doesn’t extend then dies. I’ve tried to get the micros in similar lighting/flow as the normal one but no luck. Any ideas? I have been spot feeding reef roids, and I started to try Red Sea ab+.

 

[Timfish]

Depends on which species you're talking about. I know, pretty useless answer. The Goniopora genus has a lot of different speceis. SOme have very limited distribution indicating very specific environmental conditionsa are needed and poor adaptability. Others have very wide distribution indicating adaptbillity to a wide range of conditions. Anothe r problem is how are "micro" Goniopora colonies collected or farmed or fragged. If they are just reguluar colonies that are cut up (which is my suspcion) they requirements will be essentially the same as the original colony (and we're back to what species it is). The problem with fragging a large colony and selling the frags as "micro" colonies is some studies of other genus show poor survival of frags as the frags get smaller. Survival of frags may also be very poor irregardless of size. so just fragging may not be a good option at all. Short answer I guess is "maybe".

Here's links to the some studies, they don't deal specificaly with Goniopora genus but it seems reasonable to me there would be some correlation with survivabillity based on frag size, species and environmental conditions but no one has researched Goniopora that I've found yet.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022098114001105
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X0500576X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022098198001786
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17451000.2018.1528011