Ok... This is kind of crazy!

[Hooz]

Recently, a local buddy of mine bought a "wild import" zoa rock. It had a nice sized colony of zoas that looked a lot like Thermospheres and the price was right, so he bought it on a whim. He got several frags out of the colony. He gave one to me and a few to another local buddy (the three of us pass stuff around a lot) to see how they'd grow out.

Here's what they look like in Buddy #1's tank, and a good representation of what the original colony looked like, This tank runs around 100 PAR under ReefBrite strips:

Buddy #2 has two singles in his tank in 2 different spots. He runs AB+ on Radion Gen 5 lights. The first picture is at 100 PAR:

And this pic is the same zoa in the same tank with the same lights, but at about 200 PAR:

Crazy, right? But it gets better!

Now here is my frag from the same colony. I run LuxEngine upgraded LED pucks in AI Prime HD lights on my tank. It has a much broader and fuller blue spectrum than factory AI lights and Radions. This polyp has been growing out on my frag rack in about 110 PAR:

Sorry for the fuzzy picture, I had to zoom in quite a bit to get a decent one.

But, yes. Those zoas all came from the same original colony! I know there is more than JUST lighting at play here, but it's a pretty good illustration of how spectrum and PAR can have an obvious impact on how corals color up and morph. If I showed you those four pictures with no explanation, you wouldn't even guess they were actually the same zoa.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story here is, but I thought this was pretty interesting, and figured a lot of you would too.

 

[piranhaman00]

Without a blue light filter this is meaningless , of course the same coral will look different under different light

 

[Hooz]

Without a blue light filter this is meaningless , of course the same coral will look different under different light

Picture #1 and #4 are using an Orphek orange lens. Picture #2 and #3 are using color temp corrected DSLR pictures. I guess I should've noted that in the original post.

Pic #2 and pic #3 were taken at the same time, same tank, same lights, and with the same camera and color correction, and they probably look the most different of all the pictures. The only difference between those two is the PAR they've been growing in.