Well, lets face it, "cookie monster" is kind of a cool name for a coral, I understand that ppl don't care much about Latin names anymore, its all about that "berry sunset blaster" or "intergalactic watermelon bomb" these days.
Because then no one could sell the same coral under 15 different names, and at 15 different prices.
@Katrina71 I think I found Andrew's next blue coral.I've been getting a few questions about this one lately, and since history disappears fast in this hobby, I thought it might be a good idea to record all this for posterity before I lose the pictures.
I found this coral in early 2012 at a small, now-defunct shop in NYC called Coral Theory that I visited with a friend after a frag swap. This was right around the time the first Aussie corals were coming in. I spotted it in one of their holding tanks; a single, foot-long, INSANELY blue (although bleached from being recently imported) single branch about finger-thick. I had always wanted a solid sky-blue stag like I had seen in the amazing photos of Italian reef aquariums, and I convinced them to sell me a decently-sized frag for $80, which was a lot at the time.
Tony's Cookie Monster, day 1
I grew it out for a couple years, never really having a name for it, calling it my blue stick for lack of anything better, and thinking it was just a really nice Australian hoeksemai. It only got more blue over time, and eventually surpassed even the Oregon Tort in vibrance.
A shot from 2013 under XM 10k halide, no actinics.
Late 2013, growing out
Around the same time, and unbeknownst to me, John Coppolino acquired another colony of the same species and called it the Aussie Azure, although his and mine are different shades of blue ( it's obvious when they're side-by-side). By this time, it had become clear that this was something different from the cultured hoeksemais that were in the hobby; it grew twice as thick and twice as slow. When my 80 gallon cube crashed about 4.5 years ago thanks to some horrible neighbors, I gave the colony to Sanjay Joshi, which is when we took this pic under mostly white LED light and nearly broke his facebook feed for a day or two lol.
This is when we came up with the name Cookie Monster. I also gave a few frags to RandyO at AReefCreation, who grows it to this day. He added my name to it when he put the first frags for sale here on R2R in this thread: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/nice-acro-pack.159842/#post-1856568 and it's been Tony's Cookie Monster ever since. To this day, I have never seen an acro with such a pure hippo-tang blue. Even these photos don't do it any justice.
Nah, I've grown them side-by-side. They are both super thick hoeksemai-like stags. They differ only in being slightly different shades of blue. Sanjay has grown it next to Copps' turquoise hoeksemai, too. The turquoise one grows half as thick and twice as fast.
Thanks for sharing! Beautiful piece! I picked up that frag at the sale and it’s near the top of my tank and doing well so farGot mine from ARC last year. Grows slow like Tony says. I keep it right under a puck, lots of flow, lots of feeding. Bad cell pic under actinic, but you know it really is that blue.
