Reef Raft’s 15 year old Rhodactis is more bubbly than a Bounce Shroom

Reef Builders · May 20, 2016

Bounce Shrooms have been rising in popularity over the last few years, kicking off a full-blown craze for any kind of shrooms or corallimorphs like it. There’s no doubt that the capitol-B Bounce Shroom is the Rhodactis that started it it all, but it turns out that there’s a very similar morph from Canada which is nearly twice as old in captive aquariums.

Reef Raft, also known as Reef Raft Canada, has been a factory of top shelf coral strains for mini reef aquariums since the early 2000s. They are better known for rare and super unusual tricolor and rainbow SPS corals, but it turns out the captain of that ship Jay has been nurturing a bounce-style shroom of his own for about 15 years.

We’ve seen so many OG Bounce Shrooms that we immediately recognized Reef Raft’s bubble orange corallimorph as being different. Instead of having fewer and very spherical neon orange vesicles sprouting from its surface, the Reef Raft ‘Bouncer’ Shroom is a huge field of vesicles. The vesicles are less spherical with amorphous branchlets and abundant neon orange pseudotentacles developed all the way to the margin of this Rhodactis’ oral disc.

Interestingly, Jay has been nurturing the same single polyp for fifteen years, never cutting the disc itself but only generating frags from cuttings of the polyp’s foot. It’s super interesting to learn that a bounce shroom clone has been in Canada all this time but never really gained the same notoriety as the trend-setting polyp from Florida.

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